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Weird Object Careening Across the Cosmos at Ludicrous Speeds

Object CWISE J1249 is a bit of a mystery; all we know is that it has some unique properties and it's moving really fast. Like, really fast.

The trio were participants in Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, an online collaboration wherein volunteers look at images captured by NASA’s recently retired Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). In a pre-print paper that’s been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, they wrote that, while it’s not clear what CWISE J1249 actually is, its characteristics make it likely to either be a small star or a brown dwarf. As for why the object is moving so fast, Kyle Kremer, an incoming professor at UC San Diego who worked on the paper, explained it could have been part of a binary system, but got slingshotted outward when its partner went supernova.

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