It’s an inspiring example of how citizen science can make a difference in the cosmos: a group of volunteers sifting through the archive of objects from NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 catchment area discovered an object unlike all the rest – a body racing out of the Milky Way at the breakneck speed of a million miles per hour.

CWISE J124909.08+362116.0 (nicknamed CWISE J1249 for short) was identified by Backyard Worlds’ long-time participants Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P Bickle and Dan Caselden, all of whom caught a faint, swiftly moving object streaking across images taken by NASA’s long-retired Wide Field Infrared Explorer (WISE) mission. Their follow-up observations with ground-based telescopes, holding tight to the threads of their historic sighting, thrust the object into true astronomical limelight.

Its velocity is not its only unusual feature; its low mass also makes it difficult to sort. CWISE J1249 could be a low-mass star, already burning hydrogen in its core. It could also be a brown dwarf, an intermediary between a gas giant planet and a star.

‘I was so excited,’ said Kabatnik, a citizen scientist based in Nuremberg, Germany. ‘To see these things fly over at such a high speed, that if it happens you have to report it immediately. I was convinced that it must have been reported before.’

And where did it come from? One tantalising hypothesis for CWISE J1249’s origins involves it being spit out from a binary star system, its companion exploding as a supernova, the violent stellar end that sometimes throws objects out at speeds near that of light.

So, the popularity of projects such as Backyard Worlds, with its volunteer data-sleuths, is clearly no idle by-product of the internet-age. It is, one would imagine, a big part of what’s making it fertile ground for multiple, unexpected discoveries. This newly identified ‘mini-frog’ serves as an important reminder of the superhuman volume of effort necessary to undertake these endeavours with citizen scientists.

Ultimately, the final end of CWISE J1249 will never be known, but its discovery is a testament to human ingenuity and collaboration. As this stellar speedster spirals out into the great beyond, it leaves in its wake the legacy of discovery and the idea that even the furthest corners of the cosmos might still hide more wonders waiting to be found.

©️ The Rocky Mountain Dispatch LLC. 2024

See original article at: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-citizen-scientists-spot-object-moving-1-million-miles-per-hour