NASA has found something very strange in space: a red, glowing, and mysterious sphere flying at an incredible speed. This object, called CWISE J1249, is moving at 1.6 million kilometers per hour (that’s 1 million miles per hour). It’s going so fast that it could leave the Milky Way, our galaxy!
Scientists are trying to understand what it is exactly. All they know is that it’s not a space probe or a ship, because it’s too big. So, let’s learn more about this mysterious object.
What is CWISE J1249?
This object is gigantic: it’s 30,000 times bigger than Earth, but it has only 8% of the Sun’s mass. That’s why it’s not easy to say if it’s a star or a planet. Experts say it could be something between a star and a planet, something very special. Since it’s so hard to classify, it could be a brown dwarf, which is not a real star or a regular planet.
Doctor Darren Baskill, an astronomy professor at the University of Sussex, said that this kind of object is rare and hard to study.
Who found it?
This object wasn’t discovered only by professional scientists. Regular people working as volunteers for a NASA project called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 were the first to notice it. This project lets anyone, from home, help find objects in space using sky images.
Three of those volunteers —Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden— were looking at sky images taken by a special NASA telescope called WISE. In those images, they saw something very faint (almost invisible) that was moving super fast. That caught their attention.
Later, with the help of telescopes on Earth, scientists confirmed that it really was a new discovery. The three volunteers even helped write the scientific study about the object.
Why is it moving so fast?
Objects in space usually don’t move this fast. According to Doctor Baskill, only 1 or 2 stars out of every 1,000 move this quickly. And if it keeps going, J1249 will leave our galaxy in just a few million years. Even though that sounds like a long time, for a star it’s like a blink, since many stars can live tens of billions of years.
To understand how fast it is: it’s going 2.6 times faster than the fastest space probe ever launched, which was Parker, and that flew super fast around the Sun in 2024.
How did it start moving like this?
No one knows for sure why it’s moving so fast, but there are some theories. One says that maybe it was part of a double star system, and its partner, a white dwarf, exploded in a supernova. That explosion might have pushed J1249 with so much force that it flew off through space.
Another theory says the object could have been in a group of stars that got spread out after getting too close to two black holes.
What now?
CWISE J1249 is about 400 light-years away from us. That’s very far, so there’s no danger to Earth. But it is still something very special. It is the first object this fast with the mass of a small star ever found. What’s more, it helps us learn more about the universe.
The best part is that people like you or me, who don’t work directly at NASA, can also help discover amazing things in space. All you need is curiosity and the desire to explore. Can you imagine helping to discover something flying out of the galaxy? The universe is full of mysteries, and there’s still so much left to explore!