Scientists discover mysterious 'star' travelling so fast it could escape our galaxy

There’s a mysterious object speeding round our galaxy, and it’s going so fast it could soon escape its gravity and jump right through into outer space.

The object in question, catchily named CWISE J124909.08+362116.0, is travelling at a mind-boggling 1.3 million miles an hour, or 600 kilometers a second.

Experts first came across the object after noticing it was moving at 0.1 per cent of the speed of light, which as you’d expect is abnormally fast.

So what exactly is it?

Well, if researchers are correct, CWISE J124909.08+362116.0 is a low-mass star – and the first one ever classified as a “hypervelocity” example.

The star has a very low mass, which makes it a lot harder to identify as a star – leading some to question whether it was in fact a brown dwarf.

The team behind the study have had it accepted for publication by the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

For the authors of the study, finding such an unusual celestial object is a remarkable moment.

Co-author Martin Kabatnik is a citizen scientist from Nuremberg, Germany. He said in a statement: “I can’t describe the level of excitement. When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have been reported already.”

Roman Gerasimov, a postdoctoral research fellow from University of Notre Dame is another co-author on the study. He said: “I calculated the mass of this object to be approximately 8 per cent of the mass of the Sun by comparing its observed properties to computer simulations of stellar evolution.

This places this object right on the lower boundary of allowed stellar masses, and it is in fact possible that the mass of the object is slightly below that boundary, which would imply that the object is not a star but a brown dwarf instead.”

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