A mysterious object is racing through our galaxy so fast that it may soon escape its gravity and jump straight into space.

The object in question, with the catchy name CWISE J124909.08+362116.0, is moving at an incredible 1.3 million miles per hour, or 600 kilometers per second.

Experts first discovered the object when they noticed that it was moving at 0.1 percent of the speed of light, which is expected to be unusually fast.

So what exactly is it?

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

The star has a very low mass, making it much more difficult to identify as a star – leading some to question whether it was actually a brown dwarf.

The team behind the study has accepted it for publication at Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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

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

Roman Gerasimov, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame and co-author of the study, said: “I calculated the mass of this object to be about 8 percent of the mass of the Sun by comparing its observed properties with computer simulations of stellar evolution.”

This puts this object exactly at the lower limit of the permissible stellar masses, and it is actually possible that the object’s mass is just below this limit, which would mean that the object is not a star but a brown dwarf.”

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