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NASA Citizen Scientists Spot Object Moving 1M Miles per Hour

Most familiar stars peacefully orbit the center of the Milky Way. But citizen scientists working on NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project have helped discover an object moving so fast that it will escape the Milky Way’s gravity and shoot into intergalactic space. This hypervelocity object is the first such object found with the mass similar to or […]

But citizen scientists working on NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project have helped discover an object moving so fast that it will escape the Milky Way’s gravity and shoot into intergalactic space. 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. 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.

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