Milky Way Runaway: 1-Million-MPH Hypervelocity Object Identified by Citizen Scientists
Citizen scientists in NASA's Backyard Worlds project identified CWISE J124909.08+362116.0 traveling at about 1 million miles per hour, fast enough to escape the Milky Way. Its nature is unclear, likely a brown dwarf or low-mass star, possibly ejected by a white-dwarf supernova or a close encounter in a globular cluster. The discovery, reported in Astrophysical Journal Letters, underscores the power of crowdsourced science using NASA's WISE data.