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A group of citizen scientists have managed to detect an object moving at a tremendous speed of up to 1.5 million kilometers per hour, to the point that it will escape the gravity of the Milky Way galaxy and launch into intergalactic space. This object has been named “Seawise G1249.”
Citizen scientists are amateur scientists who collaborate with scientists in scientific research, in this case amateur astronomers working on NASA's Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 online project.
The project uses images from NASA's WISE mission, which mapped the sky in the infrared range from 2009 to 2011. The program was reactivated in 2013 and will be decommissioned on August 8, 2024.
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These amateurs detected a strange movement of one of the objects in the mission images, and drew the attention of scientists to monitor this object. Several ground-based telescopes were directed to confirm the discovery and describe the object. These amateurs are now co-authors of a study about this discovery, recently published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Scientists have not yet been able to determine the nature of this object, but it may be a low-mass star or a brown dwarf. In the latter case, it is not known as a star in the conventional sense, but rather an intermediate stage located somewhere between stars and giant gas planets such as Jupiter.
According to an official press release issued by NASA, this new object has another unique property, as it contains a much lower amount of iron and other metals compared to known stars and brown dwarfs.
This unusual composition suggests that the object is very old, and likely belongs to the first generations of stars that formed in our galaxy billions of years ago.
Didn't he escape from our galaxy?
Scientists don't yet know why Seawise G1249 is traveling at such high speeds. One team of researchers suggests it was part of a binary system, where two stars orbit each other, and when one exploded as a supernova, the other was launched into space by the pressure wave from the explosion.
Another possibility is that Seawise G1249 came from a globular cluster, a huge collection of stars that are tightly bound together by gravity and orbit the center of a galaxy. Each cluster contains hundreds of thousands to millions of stars that are much closer together than stars in disks of galaxies.
In this context, researchers assume that the star met by chance with two black holes orbiting each other at a tremendous speed, which is enough to launch it like a cosmic bullet, exiting the globular cluster and escaping the entire galaxy.
