Blink and you’ll miss it.
Catch a Star
Amateur astronomers have spotted a mysterious celestial object that’s traveling at a mind-boggling speed of one million miles per hour. In fact, it’s moving so fast that it’s projected to leave behind the Milky Way and propel itself into the vast blackness of intergalactic space, according to NASA.
Captured data from ground telescopes suggests that this object may also be a literal shooting star — a small star or brown dwarf — that came from near the center of the galaxy, according to researchers who published their observations in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The team of researchers is partly made up of amateurs who participated in NASA’s crowdsourcing project called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. The so-called “citizen scientists” were the first to notice the fast-moving object, which was later confirmed by professionals using ground-based telescopes.
According to the paper, it’s the “first hypervelocity very low mass star or brown dwarf to be found” and its existence suggests there are others like it, albeit rare.
“It may represent a broader population of very high velocity, low-mass objects that have undergone extreme accelerations,” the paper reads.
Galactic Slingshot
But what accelerated the star or brown dwarf to such a ludicrous speed?
The researchers think there are two possible scenarios: either it was a companion star to a white dwarf star that experienced a supernova event. This explosion basically slingshotted the companion star out of orbit and into space at a high velocity, according to the paper.
The shooting star may have also been part of a globular cluster, a group of stars bound by gravity, and this group encountered two black holes, causing it to split apart and bounce away.
“When a star encounters a black hole binary, the complex dynamics of this three-body interaction can toss that star right out of the globular cluster,” UC San Diego astronomy assistant professor and a contributor to the study Kyle Kremer told NASA.
The researchers are now proposing to further analyze the fast-moving celestial object with advanced tools like infrared telescopes so that they can determine which is the more likely scenario.
Their efforts could help astronomers find more objects just like it, an intriguing look into the vastness of intergalactic space and its unusual inhabitants.
More on astronomy: Top Astronomers Gather to Confront Possibility They Were Very Wrong About the Universe
