(NewsNation) – Citizen scientists say they have discovered a fast-moving object that is on a trajectory aimed at leaving the Milky Way and shooting into intergalactic space.

The citizen scientists used data from NASA’s WISE telescope to discover the object, which is moving at about 1 million kilometers per hour, fast enough to escape the galaxy’s gravity. It is the first such object discovered with the mass of a small star.

Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden discovered the faint object, designated CWISE J124909.08+362116.0 (we’ll call it CWISE for short), in the WISE images. They used several ground-based telescopes to confirm the discovery and co-authored a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“I can’t describe the excitement,” Kabatnik said in a NASA article. “When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have been reported already.”

Scientists are still working to determine the exact object. It could possibly be a low-mass star or a brown dwarf, which lies somewhere between a gas giant and a star, NASA explains.

Data from the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii suggests that CWISE contains less iron and metals than other objects of its kind, making it even more mysterious. Its composition suggests that it could be not only fast but also very old, NASA says.

It’s also not entirely clear why CWISE is progressing so quickly. Scientists hope that a closer look at CWISE’s elemental composition will help narrow down the answer.