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Scientists working with NASA’s Backyard Worlds project have discovered CWISE J1249, a unique hypervelocity object rapidly leaving the Milky Way. Thanks to infrared images from NASA’s WISE mission,
Scientists working with NASA’s Backyard Worlds project have discovered CWISE J1249, a unique hypervelocity object rapidly leaving the Milky Way.
Thanks to infrared images from NASA’s WISE mission, the find includes contributions from amateur astronomers who have determined its unusual speed and composition. The object, likely a low-mass star or brown dwarf, exhibits an uncommon composition that suggests an ancient origin. Theories for its high speed include supernovas or interactions with black holes, suggesting a dynamic past in space.
Most familiar stars orbit peacefully around the center of the Milky Way. But scientists working on NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project have helped discover an object moving so fast that it has escaped the Milky Way’s gravity and shot into intergalactic space. This hypervelocity object is the first such object to be found with a mass similar to or less than that of a small star.
Backyard Worlds uses imagery from NASA’s WISE mission, or the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which mapped the sky in infrared light from 2009 to 2011. It was reactivated as NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) in 2013 and retired on August 8, 2024.
A few years ago, Backyard Worlds citizen scientists Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Casselden noticed a faint, fast-moving object called CWISE J124909.08+362116.0 walking across their screen in WISE images. Subsequent observations using several ground-based telescopes helped scientists confirm the discovery and characterize the object. These community scientists are now co-authors of the team’s research on the discovery, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters (an earlier version is available here ).
“I can’t describe the level of excitement,” said Kabatnik, a public scientist based in Nuremberg, Germany. “When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced this had to be reported.”
CWISE J1249 is moving away from the Milky Way at about 1 million miles per hour. But it is also notable for its low mass, making it difficult to classify as a celestial body. It could be a low-mass star, or if it is not regularly shedding hydrogen from its core, it would be considered a brown dwarf, placing it somewhere between a gas giant planet and a star.
Ordinary brown dwarfs aren’t all that rare. Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 volunteers have discovered over 4,000 of them! But none of the others are known to have left the galaxy.
This new object has another unique feature. Data from the WM Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii, show that it contains much less iron and other metals than other stars and brown dwarfs. This unusual composition suggests that CWISE J1249 is quite old, likely from one of the first generations of stars in our galaxy.
Why is this object moving at such a high speed? One hypothesis is that CWISE J1249 originally came from a binary white dwarf system that exploded as a supernova when it accreted too much material from its companion. Another possibility is that it came from a tightly packed cluster of stars called a globular cluster, and was blown away by a chance encounter with a pair of black holes.
“When a star collides with a binary black hole system, the complex dynamics of the three-body interaction can blow that star out of the globular cluster,” says Kyle Kremer, a new associate professor in the UC Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics in San Diego.
To understand which of these scenarios is more likely, scientists will take a closer look at the elemental composition of CWISE J1249.
The discovery was the result of teamwork on many levels, involving volunteers, professionals, and students. Kabatnik credits other citizen scientists who helped him with his research, including Melina Thévenot, who “fascinated me with her personal blog about searching using the Astronomical Data Query Language.” He said software developed by public scientist Frank Keavey also played a key role in the discovery.
The study is led by Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 science team member Adam Burgasser, a professor at UC San Diego, and co-authors Hunter Brooks and Austin Rothermich, astronomy graduate students who both began their astronomy careers as community scientists.
Want to help discover the next incredible space object? Join Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 today – participation is open to anyone, anywhere in the world.
Source: Port Altele
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