Space often presents us with images of calm. After all, every time we stop to observe it, we see stars peacefully orbiting, galaxies slowly rotating—essentially a universe that seems almost frozen in time. But now and then, something shatters this illusion. Recently, NASA announced the detection of a mysterious, high-speed sphere escaping our galaxy. And unlike most discoveries, this one didn’t come from just a giant telescope; citizen scientists played a decisive role in spotting what appeared to be nothing more than a faint red sphere streaking across the sky.
From backyard screens to cosmic speeds: how volunteers spotted the mysterious sphere
This hunt began with NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project, a platform where volunteers analyze archival images looking for unusual movements. In this case, the data came from the WISE mission, later revived as NEOWISE. It was there, in infrared images, that three veteran participants: Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden, noticed a strange, rapid glow.
At first, no one knew what it was. After all, it appeared small, faint, and almost insignificant. But its movement told a different story: it was traveling at an impressive 1 million miles per hour. Only then did the so-called “mysterious sphere” reveal its identity: an object now cataloged as CWISE J124909.08+362116.0, or simply CWISE J1249.
Too big for a planet, too small for a star: where does the cosmic fossil fit?
Now that the velocity was clear, another question arose: what exactly was this object? That’s because CWISE J1249 doesn’t fit easily into the categories typically used in astronomy. Some estimates suggest it’s about 30,000 times the mass of Earth, which is roughly 8% the mass of the Sun. This places it in a gray zone, too large to be a planet and too small to be a conventional star. As Dr. Darren Baskill of the University of Sussex explained: “Somewhere between a star and a planet, the object has not yet been identified.”
And what’s even more intriguing is its composition. Using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, scientists discovered that J1249 has much lower amounts of iron and other metals than typical stars and brown dwarfs. According to NASA, this suggests it may be incredibly old, perhaps formed in the first generations of stars in the Milky Way. Essentially, it’s a true cosmic fossil and a valuable clue about the evolution of our galaxy, just like this galactic fossil drifting through space that NASA also recently detected.
The universe’s fastest fugitive: supernova kick or black hole slingshot?
Now, if its size and composition were already peculiar, its speed is the real mystery. And that leaves the question: why does it move so fast that it can escape the Milky Way’s gravity in just a few tens of millions of years? Two main hypotheses are on the table:
- The supernova scenario — J1249 may have been part of a binary system with a white dwarf. When the dwarf accumulated too much mass, it exploded as a supernova, hurling J1249 outward at high speed.
- The black hole slingshot — Another idea is that it originated from a globular cluster, where a close encounter with a pair of black holes hurled it violently into interstellar space.
In fact, Baskill explains this slingshot effect simply: “One way to reach such extreme speeds is to fall toward an object… and miss.” It’s essentially the same principle used by space agencies to accelerate probes using gravitational assist. To give you an idea of the scale: J1249 moves 2.6 times faster than the Parker Solar Probe, the fastest probe ever built, which broke records by circling the Sun in 2024. This mysterious sphere easily outperforms humanity’s most advanced technology… even more advanced than those supercomputers that cracked the teleportation code.
