Blink and you’ll miss it.
Catch a star
Amateur astronomers have discovered a mysterious celestial object moving at an astonishing speed of one million miles per hour.
In fact, it’s moving so fast that it’s expected to leave the Milky Way and propel itself into the vast blackness of intergalactic space, According to NASA.
Data from ground-based telescopes suggest that the object may also be a true shooting star — a small star or brown dwarf — that came from near the center of the galaxy, according to researchers who published Their comments In the magazine Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The research team is made up in part of hobbyists who participated in a NASA crowdsourcing project called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9The so-called “citizen scientists” were the first to notice the fast-moving object, which was later confirmed by specialists using ground-based telescopes.
According to the paper, it is “the first very low-mass hypervelocity star or brown dwarf to be found,” and its presence suggests that other stars like it exist, albeit rare.
“This may represent a larger number of very high-velocity, low-mass objects that were subjected to extreme accelerations,” the paper reads.
Hungarian Slingshot
But what caused the star or brown dwarf to accelerate to such ridiculous speed?
The researchers believe there are two possible scenarios: Either it was a companion star to a white dwarf star that went supernova. According to the paper, this explosion sent the companion star out of orbit and into space at high speed.
The falling star may also be part of a globular cluster, a group of stars bound together by gravity, that has encountered two black holes, causing it to split apart and bounce away.
“When a star encounters a binary black hole, the complex dynamics of this interaction between the three objects can eject that star out of the globular cluster,” Kyle Creamer, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of California, San Diego, and a co-author of the study, told NASA.
The researchers now propose further analysis of this fast-moving celestial body using advanced instruments such as infrared telescopes so they can determine the most likely scenario.
Their efforts may help astronomers find more objects like it, an intriguing look into the vastness of intergalactic space and its unusual inhabitants.
More about astronomy: Top Astronomers Gather to Face the Possibility They Were Completely Wrong About the Universe
