Astronomers discover a nearby star moving so fast it could even escape the Milky Way
Astronomers, both professional and amateur, have discovered a nearby star only 400 light years away that is moving so fast, 1.3 million miles per hour (almost three times faster than the Sun), it might very well escape the Milky Way and fly into intergalactic space in the far future.
The star, named CWISE J124909+362116.0 (or “J1249+36” for short), was first spotted by some of the over 80,000 citizen science volunteers participating in the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project, who comb through enormous reams of data collected over the past 14 years by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. This project capitalizes on the keen ability of humans, who are evolutionarily programmed to look for patterns and spot anomalies in a way that is unmatched by computer technology. Volunteers tag moving objects in data files and when enough volunteers tag the same object, astronomers investigate.
J1249+36 immediately stood out because it was moving at about .1 percent the speed of light.
The star itself is either a very low mass red dwarf, or possibly a brown dwarf that never quite had enough mass to ignite as a star.
You can read the research paper here [pdf]. The researchers posit two possible explanations for the star’s speed. Either it was once part of a binary and thrown out when its white dwarf companion exploded as a supernova, or was once located in a densely packed globular cluster, where the interaction with other stars or even black holes could have flung it away.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Astronomers, both professional and amateur, have discovered a nearby star only 400 light years away that is moving so fast, 1.3 million miles per hour (almost three times faster than the Sun), it might very well escape the Milky Way and fly into intergalactic space in the far future.
The star, named CWISE J124909+362116.0 (or “J1249+36” for short), was first spotted by some of the over 80,000 citizen science volunteers participating in the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project, who comb through enormous reams of data collected over the past 14 years by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. This project capitalizes on the keen ability of humans, who are evolutionarily programmed to look for patterns and spot anomalies in a way that is unmatched by computer technology. Volunteers tag moving objects in data files and when enough volunteers tag the same object, astronomers investigate.
J1249+36 immediately stood out because it was moving at about .1 percent the speed of light.
The star itself is either a very low mass red dwarf, or possibly a brown dwarf that never quite had enough mass to ignite as a star.
You can read the research paper here [pdf]. The researchers posit two possible explanations for the star’s speed. Either it was once part of a binary and thrown out when its white dwarf companion exploded as a supernova, or was once located in a densely packed globular cluster, where the interaction with other stars or even black holes could have flung it away.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
haven’t read the paper yet.
-What frame-of-reference are we talking about?
Earths Motion Through the Galaxy
https://youtu.be/1lPJ5SX5p08
20:27
This makes me remember a passage from “Against A Dark Background” by Iain M Banks, describing an intergalactic star and the civ that grew up around it.
“For a distance that was never less than a million light years in any direction around it, Thrial-for all its flamboyant dispersion of vivifying power and its richly fertile crop of children planets-was an orphan.”
Iain Banks, one of the greatest SF authors, in my opinion, and sorely missed.
The L subdwarf is making a run for it. Incredible speed for an old timer star. I like the black-hole binary theory, but the other theories are interesting as well.
“For a distance that was never less than a million light years in any direction around it…”
Placing that (fictional) system in between (e.g.) the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy [M31]? Nope, I’m afraid that doesn’t work. While there may be voids in the cosmos where it’s true—i.e., there’s “nothing” (galactic) closer than a million light years in any direction—however, here in our so-called “Local Group” of galaxies (to which both the Milky Way and Andromeda-M31 belong), it’s certainly non-functional.
For instance, far from being the closest galaxy to the Milky Way in the Local Group, Andromeda-M31 actually appears as the 86th [!] closest known galaxy to us—with the Milky Way at the top as #1.
Among the many galaxies closer than Andromeda (which lies 2.538 million light years away from us), the two “Magellanic Clouds”—the Large M.C. being #19, and Small M.C. #23, in the foregoing galaxy list (at 0.163 and 0.205 million light years distant respectively)—are no doubt the best known.
To bad Banks (at least apparently) wasn’t aware of that.
Sorry; forgot the link to the list of nearest galaxies.
Imagine an inhabitable planet in orbit there. Your night sky would FOREVER change, NEVER being static nor cyclical.
Nothing relativisticly weird happens at 0.1c, does it?
Would there be visible red/blue shift of nearby stars? That would do odd things to astronomy until they realized that they were the ones moving.
A lifetime (say 100 years) at 0.1c would be 10 light years. I would think that would be sufficient to see some stars switch from blue-shift to red-shift during one’s own lifetime. Maybe like seeing Haley’s comet twice. Not every one does, but it’s not exactly uncommon, either.
Not exactly a new discovery: https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2005/02/10/In-the-Stars-Odd-stars-odder-planets/89101108072217/?upi_ss=%22phil+berardelli%22
“Take SDSS J090745.0+24507, a star so unremarkable that astronomers had not even it given a formal name. Yet, of all the stars populating the Milky Way’s spiral arms and orbiting around its center — by latest estimates more than 400 billion — SDSS J090745.0+24507 is doing something unique: it is leaving.”
Phil Berardelli: These I think are different stars. Moreover, the paper didn’t claim to have discovered the first such fast moving star, only that this one is unique in that it is only 400 light year away.
This Is How Big The Local Group of Galaxies Is
Anton Petrov
https://youtu.be/GW2a9xwpd50
12:26
Bob, I wasn’t implying they were the same star, only that the discovery of a rogue on a gallactic escape trajectory isn’t exactly new. Apparently these binary encounters sometimes can produce dramatic results.