By: Steph Whiteside Posted: Aug 16, 2024 / 03:47 PM CDT
Paragraphs below extract for personal use from https://www.wkrg.com/news/citizen-scientists-discover-object-soaring-out-of-the-galaxy
(NewsNation) — Citizen scientists say they have discovered a fast-moving object on a trajectory to escape the Milky Way and shoot into intergalactic space.
The citizen scientists used data from NASA’s WISE telescope to discover the object, which is moving at about 1 millions miles per hour. That’s fast enough that it will be able to escape the galaxy’s gravity. It’s the first such object discovered to have the mass of a small star.
Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle and Dan Caselden are credited with finding the faint object, known as CWISE J124909.08+362116.0 (we’ll call it CWISE for short) in the WISE images. They followed up using several ground-based telescopes to confirm the discovery and co-authored a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“I can’t describe the level of excitement,” said Kabatnik in a NASA article. “When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have been reported already.”
Scientists are still working to determine exactly what the object is. It could possibly be a low-mass star or a brown dwarf, which is somewhere between a gas giant planet and a star, NASA explains.