A mysterious object speeding at 16,09,344 kmph in space has been spotted by a group of NASA’s citizen scientists. Scientists used images from NASA’s WISE, or Wide-field Infrared Explorer, mission, to spot the object. It has been named CWISE J1249 and it’s zooming out of the Milky Way galaxy. “I can’t describe…level of excitement,” one of the scientists said.
“I can’t describe the level of excitement,” said Kabatnik, a citizen scientist from Nuremberg, Germany. “When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have been reported already.”
CWISE J1249 is zooming out of the Milky Way at about 1 million miles per hour. But it also stands out for its low mass, which makes it difficult to classify as a celestial object. It could be a low-mass star, or if it doesn’t steadily fuse hydrogen in its core, it would be considered a brown dwarf, putting it somewhere between a gas giant planet and a star.