When you were five years old, you probably watched your best friend run “a million miles an hour” as he beat everyone else at the local track meet. You’ve probably never seen anything go that fast. However, according to NASA, a group of citizen scientists observed a celestial object doing just that!

The group of citizen scientists was involved in a NASA program called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. They were working on images from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Explorer mission. While searching through stored images, Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle and Dan Caselden discovered a strangely fast object called CWISE J124909.08+362116.0. There are many fast-moving objects in space, but few are as fast as this one. It is literally hurtling through the Milky Way at about 1.6 million kilometers per hour.

It is not entirely clear what exactly the object is. It appears light enough to be a low-mass star or possibly a brown dwarf – somewhere between the classifications of gas giant and star. It also has suspiciously low iron and metal content. The leading hypothesis is that CWISE J1249 may have been ejected from a supernova or that it was hurled around a pair of black holes.

It’s still a mystery at the moment. It’s a great discovery that really highlights the value of citizen science. If you’ve done your own rigorous science – using NASA data or your own – let us know!