In his spare time Tom Bickle an astronomy student in Southampton England likes to blast heavy metal while combing through time lapses of the night sky hunting for traces of a hypothesized ninth planet and other hidden objects lurking in the outskirts of our solar system.
It was on one such occasion that he stumbled across something strange: a faint blob moving across his computer screen.
I knew immediately that it was unusual Mr. Bickle said. Professional astronomers followed up on the observation.
The object is either a low mass star or an object known as a brown dwarf and it is hurtling through space at a million miles per hour.
At that speed it could be traveling fast enough to break free from the gravitational clutches of the Milky Way.
It was right when that number came out that we realized we had something spectacular said Adam Burgasser a physicist at the University of California San Diego who led a study of the observation published this month in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
We were very excited. The discovery has the potential to shed light on the oldest and some of the fastest stars in our galaxy known as halo stars.
One of the ways we find old stars is that we know they’re moving in very strange orbits Dr. Burgasser said.
Most stars in the vicinity of our sun orbit around the disk of the Milky Way in a circle. But halo stars often have trajectories that are ovular or tilted away from the galactic plane.
That’s because they most likely formed before the Milky Way settled into its current structure Dr.
Burgasser said. The fast speeds of halo stars are really a signature of their different origins he added.
More than a dozen hypervelocity stars which zip across the galaxy at more than 900 000 miles per hour twice the speed of our sun have been discovered so far.
But all of them are close to or greater than the sun’s mass. By contrast the newly found object cataloged as CWISE J1249 3621 by astronomers is only 8 percent of the sun’s mass.
That is right at the classification boundary between a star and a brown dwarf also known as a failed star because it lacks enough mass to fuse hydrogen.
