NASA Discovers CWISE J1249: The Fastest Object in the Milky Way Moving at 1.6 Million km/h

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NASA announced the discovery made by astronauts Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle and Dan Caselden August 15, 2024. The men participated in the NASA Backyard Worlds project, which used WISE (Wide-field Infrared Explorer) images taken in 2009–2011 using cameras recording infrared images. It’s in these pictures A few years ago, a fast moving object called CWISE J1249 was discoveredwhich travels at a speed of 1.6 million km per hour.

Further observations using ground-based telescopes better documented the discovery, which is described in more detail in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Although there is no shortage of fast-moving objects in the Milky Way, CWISE J1249 is characterized by low pressurewhich is equal to or less than the mass of a small star. Researchers also have another hypothesis:

If an object does not constantly burn hydrogen in its core, it will be considered a brown dwarf, which places it somewhere between a gas giant and a star.

Brown dwarfs are not that uncommon in the Milky Way, though So far, no such thing has tried to leave our galaxy. In addition, CWISE J1249 is characterized by its unusual composition:

It contains much less iron and other metals than other stars and brown dwarfs. This unusual composition suggests that CWISE J1249 is very old, perhaps from one of the first generations of stars in our galaxy.

Scientists have several theories about why why the detected object is moving so fast, and one explanation is that CWISE J1249 was part of a global clusterand when he encountered a pair of black holes he went away. “When a star encounters a binary black hole, the complex dynamics of this three-body interaction can knock the star out of the global cluster,” says Kyle Kremer, another at the University of California, San Diego.

Researchers now want to study the composition of CWISE J1249 to determine the most likely scenario. The researchers themselves do not hide their satisfaction – Martin Kabatnik from Nuremberg, Germany said:

I can’t describe the level of happiness. When I first saw how fast it was moving, I thought it had already been reported.

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