Amateur Astronomers Discover Cosmic Body Racing Through Space at One Million Miles per Hour

Amateur astronomers have contributed to many remarkable extraterrestrial discoveries. These days, the biggest prize for the fledlging space researchers is finding "Planet 9," a hypothetical heavenly body believed to be at the edge of the Solar System, IFL Science reported. In their attempt at locating Planet 9, a group of astronomers found a cosmic object racing through the universe at one million miles per hour.

The discovery was made by  Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 contributors Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden, IFL Science reported. The team located the cosmic object a few years ago using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission that mapped the sky in infrared.

According to the testimonies provided by these contributors, the object has the features of a brown dwarf.

A brown dwarf is an astronomical body unable to get big enough to fuse hydrogen in their core, IFL Science reported. During the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 program almost 4,000 brown dwarfs were discovered by space enthusiasts.

The amateur astronomers used the WISE data provided by NASA  to characterize the unique object, IFL Science reported. The brown dwarf has been named CWISE J124909.08+362116.0.

Some experts have raised doubts about whether the body was a brown dwarf, and believe it could be a very low-mass star, which has a velocity so high that the Milky Way Galaxy can't hold on to it.

The cosmic body found by Kabatnik, Bickle, and Caselden is unique as none of the previous brown dwarfs had such a high pace, IFL Science reported. The team was excited about spotting the astronomical object.

"I can’t describe the level of excitement," Kabatnik, from Nuremberg, Germany, who is a co-author on a new paper describing the discovery, said in a statement. "When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have been reported already."

Several theories have been posited regarding the enormous pace of the cosmic object, IFL Science reported. One is that the body is in a binary system with a white dwarf.

The companion took material from its partner to go supernova, and as a result, the cosmic body got a huge hit and went flying away. Another explanation provided by the experts was that the object encountered a pair of binary black holes, and was thrown out of the cluster at a huge speed.