NASA Discovers Mysterious Object Moving Through Space at 1 Million Kph

A lightning-fast object, more than 27,306 times the size of Earth, is hurtling through our galaxy so fast that it may break away from the Milky Way, NASA says.

Scientists determined that the mysterious object was traveling at a whopping 1.6 million kilometers per hour when they spotted it more than 400 light-years away from Earth. One light-year is equal to six trillion kilometers.

Although experts have not yet determined what kind of celestial body it is, they suspect it is a “brown dwarf”: a star that is larger than a planet but does not have enough mass to sustain long-term nuclear fusion in its core, like Earth’s sun.

If the object does indeed turn out to be a brown dwarf, it would be the first time it has been observed in a chaotic, super-fast orbit around Earth, allowing it to break away from our home galaxy.

A coalition of citizen scientists from NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project was the first to discover the celestial body, the US space agency confirmed this week.

“I can’t describe the level of excitement,” says German citizen scientist Martin Kabatnik, a long-time member of NASA’s Backyard Worlds programaccording to a statement.

“When I first saw how fast it was moving,” the Nuremberg investigator confessed, “I was convinced it must have been reported before.”

Backyard Worlds citizen scientists Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden were the first to discover this million-mph object a few years ago, earning the super-fast object the catalog name CWISE J124909.08+362116.0.

According to astronomer Dr. Kyle Kremerwho worked with them to better understand the object, several astrophysics theories could explain how the object, known as CWISE J1249 for short, was able to reach this incredible speed.

One theory is that CWISE J1249 sprang from a two-star system, or binary star, after its “white dwarf” sibling died. The star collapsed in an explosive, uncontrolled nuclear fusion reaction, a so-called supernova.

Another viable theory holds that CWISE J1249 formed in a dense cluster of stars, called a globular cluster, and was then flung away by the gravitational pull of a black hole.

“When a star encounters a binary star system with a black hole,” Dr. Kremer said in a NASA statement about the discovery, “the complex dynamics of this three-body interaction can throw that star right out of the globular cluster.”

The volunteers who make up NASA’s ‘Backyard Worlds’ are working with interstellar imagery data collected by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) – a large-scale ‘all-sky’ survey that ran from 2009-2011 and again from 2013-2024. Above, the WISE telescope (artist’s concept)

NASA’s WISE telescope scans led to the discovery of thousands of small planets in our galaxy and Earth’s first “trojan asteroid,” a rock that orbits the sun in the same ring as our own planet. Above, a WISE mosaic of the Heart and Soul Nebulae about 6,000 light-years from Earth

A large number of university academics and government scientists, including members of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, have now compiled a report on the observations of these volunteer citizen scientists, pending peer review on Cornell’s arXiv place.

These experts, including an astronomer from the University of Leicester and an astrophysicist from the American Museum of Natural History, have themselves argued that the object is a “hypervelocity L subdwarf.”

This would make it one of the smallest objects ever documented as a brown dwarf.

The international group of volunteers who make up NASA’s “Backyard Worlds” work with interstellar imaging data collected by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) — a large-scale survey of the entire sky that ran from 2009 to 2011 and again from 2013 to 2024.

Scans from NASA’s WISE telescope led to the discovery of thousands of small planets in our galaxy, multiple star clusters and the first “Trojan asteroid” on Earth, a rock orbiting the sun in the same ring as our own planet.

NASA hopes that the general public, like the Backyard Worlds team, will make even more discoveries with this massive amount of space data.

The researchers tested 100 scenarios to see where the fast CWISE J1249 might go next. The team found multiple scenarios (straight gray lines above) in which this L subdwarf is likely to eject itself from the Milky Way (the blue-dashed circle is the boundary of our Milky Way).

According to NASA, scientists plan to test more equipment on CWISE J1249 to get a better picture of the spacecraft’s chemical makeup, or “elemental composition.”

The chemical composition of this lightning-fast object could “provide clues about which of these scenarios is most likely”: was it flung out by a black hole or a collapsing white dwarf, is it a gas giant or a burning brown dwarf?

Using open source software for modeling galactic orbits of celestial bodies, called bilethese researchers tested “100 random initial conditions” alongside the identifying data they already knew about CWISE J1249 to see what might come next.

As published in their arXiv paper, which is awaiting peer review by the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the team found multiple scenarios in which this suspected “hypervelocity L subdwarf” would likely eject itself from the Milky Way.

“Given the uncertainties in the derived velocities and potential models,” the researchers wrote in their study, “we conclude that (WISE) J1249+3621 has a significant probability of being detached from the Milky Way.”

“17 percent of our simulated orbits are unbound in 10 gigayears,” they added. This means the object could launch itself into the unknown in about 10 billion years.