Citizen Scientists Are Observing Strange Matter Across the Cosmos at High Speed

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to make important astronomical discoveries. Sometimes, all it takes is an internet connection and some free time.

That’s all Tom Bickle, Martin Kabatnik, and Austin Rothermich needed to find a celestial object orbiting the Milky Way at nearly a million miles (1.6 million km) per hour. The trio were participating in Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, an online collaboration where volunteers view images captured by NASA’s recently retired Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The goal is to see objects on the outskirts of the solar system, such as small brown objects (balls of gas too big to be planets, but too small to be stars), low-mass stars, and even a hypothetical ninth planet orbiting the Sun. .

The images sent by citizen scientists were actually processed from WISE’s infrared cameras, which capture wavelengths of light invisible to the human eye. The volunteers analyzed a series of images of the same object taken five years apart, which helped them sort out stars too far away to be of interest, as well as potential problems with the WISE instruments.

In one such series, Bickle, Kabatnik, and Rothermich noticed something moving in the pictures. Report their findings on the Backyard Worlds website. Scientists followed up their findings by observing the object with the University of Hawaii’s Near-Infrared Echellette Spectrometer telescope, and it was given the name CWISE J1249.

A team of scientists from NASA, UC San Diego, and several other universities are willing to examine the data. In a preprinted paper accepted for publication in Astronomical Journal Letterswrote that, although it is not clear what exactly CWISE J1249 is, its properties make it possible that it is a dwarf or brown dwarf star. Whatever it is, it’s moving fast, with what researchers call a “unique trajectory and speed.” Very quickly, it seems that it will eventually break free from the pull of the Milky Way and shoot off into intergalactic space.

It’s not just unusual speed. The data show that CWISE J1249 contains less iron and other metals than other observed dwarf stars, suggesting that it is a very old object, dating back to the early days of the Milky Way.

“I can’t describe the level of excitement,” Kabatnik, who lives in Nuremberg, Germany, said in a statement. “When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was sure it must have been reported already.”

As for why the object is moving so fast, Kyle Kremer, an incoming professor at UC San Diego who worked on the paper, explained that it may have been part of a binary system, but was shot out when its partner went supernova. Another explanation is that it started as part of a globular cluster (a large cluster of stars), but had a merger near two black holes, a “complex dynamic force” that “could throw that star out of the globular cluster.” .”

It might seem like the three citizen scientists got a raw deal, since the thing isn’t named after them (at least, not yet). Don’t feel too bad. These three were listed among the authors of the study, so they have good bragging rights at their next Christmas party.