Astronomer from Bavaria finds impressive celestial phenomenon: NASA is thrilled

As part of a NASA project, so-called citizen scientists have made a remarkable discovery. The phenomenon is moving very quickly.

Nuremberg – NASA’s “Citizen Science Projects” allow volunteers around the world to take part in scientific discoveries. NASA also calls amateur astronomers “citizen scientists”. Such volunteers helped discover an extraordinary object as part of the Backyards Worlds: Planet 9 project.

NASA citizen scientists make extraordinary discovery

As NASA explains in a statement in mid-August, most stars orbit peacefully around the center of the Milky Way. However, the object that the amateur astronomers discovered is moving so quickly that it escapes the Milky Way’s gravity and shoots into intergalactic space. “This hypervelocity object is the first object of its kind found with a mass similar to or smaller than that of a small star,” NASA said.

Longtime Backyard Worlds citizen scientists Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle and Dan Caselden discovered this faint, fast-moving object called CWISE J124909.08+362116.0. Follow-up observations with multiple ground-based telescopes helped scientists confirm the discovery and characterize the object. These “citizen scientists” were now co-authors of the team’s study of this discovery, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Nürnberger cannot believe his luck at the discovery

“I can’t put my excitement into words,” said Kabatnik, who comes from Nuremberg. “When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have already been reported.”

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The object, CWISE J1249, is zooming out of the Milky Way at about 1 million miles per hour. But it is also characterized by its low mass. It could be a star or, if it does not constantly fuse hydrogen in its core, it would be called a brown dwarf (a special position between a star and a planet). Ordinary brown dwarfs are not that rare, according to NASA. The object also contains much less iron and other metals than other stars or brown dwarfs. “This unusual composition suggests that CWISE J1249 is quite old and likely belongs to one of the first generations of stars in our galaxy.”