Good morning! Here are a few of this week’s most interesting science stories to read while you’re settling into the couch with your cup of General Foods International French Vanilla Cafe.
Good morning! Here are a few of this week’s most interesting science stories to read while you’re settling into the couch with your cup of General Foods International French Vanilla Cafe.
In the citizen science project Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, volunteers look for patterns in the vast ocean of data accumulated over the 14 years of NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission. They tag moving objects in the data files and when many volunteers flag the same object, astronomers investigate the finding.
Anyway, this collective of volunteers recently flagged a faint red star tearing through the Milky Way at about 1.3 million miles per hour, or 600 kilometers per second, representing the discovery of the first low-mass, hypervelocity star and the nearest hypervelocity object to the sun.
This raises the obvious question: Why is this thing so speedy? The researchers speculate that the object, called CWISE J124909+362116.0, could have been a subdwarf of a white dwarf binary system that was blasted into its current trajectory when the white dwarf exploded into a supernova. There’s also a cooler theory involving a tightly bound pair of black holes hurling J1249+36 out of a globular cluster.
Moving at 0.1% the speed of light, J1249+36 is moving fast enough that it will, in all likelihood, eventually escape the Milky Way.
