Space
NASA detects object 27,000 times larger than Earth moving at 1.6 million km/h
Researchers from NASA, the United States space agency, have identified an object that is more than 27,000 times the size of Earth and that is moving away from the Milky Way at around 1.6 million kilometers per hour.
According to a statement released by the agency on the 15th, the object was identified by three scientists from NASA's Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project and the speed is so high that it will escape the gravity of the Milky Way and head towards intergalactic space.
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Martin Kabatnik, a researcher based in Nuremberg, Germany, said he could not “describe the level of excitement.” “When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it should have been reported already,” he said.
According to the NASA statement, the object, despite its size and speed, stands out for its low mass, which makes it difficult to classify as a celestial object. “It could be a low-mass star, or if it does not constantly fuse hydrogen in its core, it would be considered a brown dwarf, placing it somewhere between a gas giant planet and a star,” the report noted.
“It could be a low-mass star, or if it does not constantly fuse hydrogen in its core, it would be considered a brown dwarf, placing it somewhere between a gas giant planet and a star,” the report noted.
According to NASA, brown dwarfs are objects that are between the size of a giant planet like Jupiter and that of a small star. The agency explained in the note that more than 4 thousand common brown dwarfs have already been discovered, but none had previously shown movement out of the galaxy.
The properties of the object, which has much less iron and other metals than other stars and brown dwarfs, suggest it is quite old, “probably from one of the earliest generations of stars in our galaxy.”
NASA pointed to two theories for why the object moved at such a high speed. One is that it originally came from a binary system with a white dwarf (the stellar core left behind after a dying star uses up its nuclear fuel), which exploded as a supernova when it ripped away too much material from its companion.
Turning into a space cadet arent you? LOL