Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Space NASA Science

NASA Citizen Scientists Spot Object Moving 1 Million Miles Per Hour (nasa.gov) 58

Posted by BeauHD from the hide-and-seek dept.
Citizen scientists from NASA's Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project discovered a hypervelocity object, CWISE J1249, moving fast enough to escape the Milky Way. "This hypervelocity object is the first such object found with the mass similar to or less than that of a small star," reports NASA's Science Editorial Team, suggesting the object may have originated from a binary star system or a globular cluster. From the report: A few years ago, longtime Backyard Worlds citizen scientists Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden spotted a faint, fast-moving object called CWISE J124909.08+362116.0, marching across their screens in the WISE images. Follow-up observations with several ground-based telescopes helped scientists confirm the discovery and characterize the object. These citizen scientists are now co-authors on the team's study about this discovery published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters (a pre-print version is available here). CWISE J1249 is zooming out of the Milky Way at about 1 million miles per hour. But it also stands out for its low mass, which makes it difficult to classify as a celestial object. It could be a low-mass star, or if it doesn't steadily fuse hydrogen in its core, it would be considered a brown dwarf, putting it somewhere between a gas giant planet and a star.

Ordinary brown dwarfs are not that rare. Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 volunteers have discovered more than 4,000 of them! But none of the others are known to be on their way out of the galaxy. This new object has yet another unique property. Data obtained with the W. M. Keck Observatory in Maunakea, Hawaii, show that it has 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 does this object move at such high speed? One hypothesis is that CWISE J1249 originally came from a binary system with a white dwarf, which exploded as a supernova when it pulled off too much material from its companion. Another possibility is that it came from a tightly bound cluster of stars called a globular cluster, and a chance meeting with a pair of black holes sent it soaring away.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

NASA Citizen Scientists Spot Object Moving 1 Million Miles Per Hour More

NASA Citizen Scientists Spot Object Moving 1 Million Miles Per Hour

Comments Filter:

  • That's about 1/669th the speed of light. From Earth at that speed it would take over 2500 years to reach the nearest star.

  • Units (Score:5, Informative)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Saturday August 17, 2024 @03:27AM (#64713200)

    Miles per hour is not an astronomical measurement.

    It works out to 447 Kilometres per second

    Still that is pretty fast

    • Exactly, thanks for converting that!

      For reference: the planets go around the sun in tens of km/s, the sun orbits the center of the milky way in about 200km/s. That is why km/s is a proper unit here.

      "Millions of miles per hour" is a populist way of saying "much faster than your car" to a marginal fraction of the planet.

    • Re:Units (Score:5, Funny)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday August 17, 2024 @05:24AM (#64713284)

      Miles per hour is not an astronomical measurement.

      To put this into proper units - the object is traveling approximately 2687994655.2242 furlongs per fortnight.

    • Miles per hour is not an astronomical measurement.

      A bit of amusing irony about that statement: Much of the work of traditional astronomy was done in the cgs system - centimeters, grams, seconds. So folks were metricating light-years in centimeters and stellar masses in grams. lol

    • Miles per hour is not an astronomical measurement.

      It works out to 447 Kilometres per second

      Still that is pretty fast

      If this were the 1920s, your character would be humorously portrayed as starting each sentence with "Acktually ..."

    • I agree. Miles are dreadful, especially for space. But if we are going to be picky, one million miles per hour is 400 kilometres per second. (400 not 447 due to significant figures, and lowercase k on kilometres)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by youn ( 1516637 )

      Sweet. Does anyone know what it works out in Libraries of congress per second? :p

  • Extragalactic? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Saturday August 17, 2024 @03:30AM (#64713208) Journal
    Travelling at ~450 km/s means it is going at about 0.15% of c and if it really is as old as the first generation of stars i.e. ~10+ billion years old then that suggests it is old enough and fast enough not to perhaps not have originated in the Milky Way. For example, the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years away which only takes less that 2 billion years travelling at this object's speed, much less than its suggested age and it could probably have come from anywhere in the local cluster.

    • Yes, it may be from outside the Milky Way and just passing through.

      That's more likely than some of the conjectures in TFA:

      1. It was not ejected from a binary system. Binary systems are stable. Ejections only happen from systems with three or more stars.

      2. It was not accelerated by a companion supernova. A supernova or hypernova could not have accelerated a companion star to that velocity without blowing it apart.

      • It was not ejected from a binary system. Binary systems are stable. Ejections only happen from systems with three or more stars.

        Wrong [washington.edu].

        • Wrong [washington.edu].

          Your link is about binary star systems ejecting planets, not one of the stars.

          • "if it doesn't steadily fuse hydrogen in its core, it would be considered a brown dwarf, putting it somewhere between a gas giant planet and a star."

            Given a binary star system with actual stars, something of lower mass can be ejected. The stars stay, the brown dwarf goes.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by SpzToid ( 869795 )

        Yes, it may be from outside the Milky Way and just passing through.

        That's more likely than some of the conjectures in TFA:

        1. It was not ejected from a binary system. Binary systems are stable. Ejections only happen from systems with three or more stars.

        2. It was not accelerated by a companion supernova. A supernova or hypernova could not have accelerated a companion star to that velocity without blowing it apart.

        Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dustin' crops boy! Without precise calculations you could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your journey real quick, wouldn't it?

        ~Hans Solo [youtube.com]

      • Binaries that formed as binaries are stable. But even they are only stable until something destabilizes them. Star systems may have quite a few close brushes with each other over their lifetimes.

  • Pierson's Puppeteers? (Score:3)

    by alanw ( 1822 ) <alan@wylie.me.uk> on Saturday August 17, 2024 @03:32AM (#64713210) Homepage

    A third possibility is that it's Pierson's Puppeteers escaping the exploding galactic core.

  • Manhole cover.

  • Expect Necromongers to follow.

  • I mean, 1e6 MPH relative to the last asteroid to drift through these parts, 1e6 MPH relative to Sol, 1e6 MPH relative to Sagittarius? They're (slightly) different things. Nothing in the universe moves relative to itself.

    I know, I'm just being pedantic. When the summary is clearly written to sensationalize, it's sometimes hard to see how mundane the event being sensationalized truly is. Solar systems eject planets as part of their formation process (due to collisions, I think?). It doesn't take a great

  • After all, it's only 10 times faster and that was a long time ago.:-)

  • outrunning the Space Speed Patrol

  • If this object was traveling straight at us, how long between the point when we can see it in the night sky with naked eye and the impact?
    In other words how far can we see an object with such brightness?

Slashdot Top Deals

Nobody said computers were going to be polite.

Close