Researchers from the US space agency NASA have discovered an object more than 27 thousand times the size of Earth, moving away from the Milky Way galaxy at a speed of 1.6 million kilometers per hour.
According to a statement issued by the agency on the 15th, the object was identified by three scientists from NASA's Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project, and its speed was so high that it would escape the gravity of the Milky Way and head toward intergalactic space.
“I can’t describe the level of excitement,” said Martin Kabatnik, a researcher based in Nuremberg, Germany. “When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it should have been reported.”
According to a NASA statement, the object, despite its size and speed, is characterized by its low mass, which makes it difficult to classify it as a celestial body.
The report noted that “it could be a low-mass star, or if it is not continuously fusing hydrogen in its core, it would be considered a brown dwarf, which puts it somewhere between a gas giant planet and a star.”
According to NASA, brown dwarfs are objects that range in size from a giant planet like Jupiter to a small star. The agency explained in the note that more than 4,000 common brown dwarf stars have already been discovered, but none have shown movement outside the galaxy before.
The properties of the object, which contains much less iron and other metals than other stars and brown dwarfs, suggest it is very old, “possibly from one of the oldest generations of stars in our galaxy.”
NASA has cited two theories as to why the object is moving so fast. The first is that it originally came from a binary system with a white dwarf (the stellar core left over after a dying star burns out its nuclear fuel) that exploded as a supernova when it ripped too much material from its companion.
“Another possibility is that it came from a compact group of stars called a globular cluster, and a chance encounter with a pair of black holes sent it flying away,” the agency described.
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