The Milky Way galaxy is much stranger. More to the point, ours understanding of how strange the galaxy is is much better.
The Milky Way may have a staggering number of dead stars, some of which may be almost as old as the galaxy itself.
We have an amateur astrological observer to appreciate the discovery. Dan Caselden was playing the video game Counter-Strike one night back in 2018, when a custom software program he had created to analyze data from a NASA star survey found something strange.
A huge cold object in space, moving rapidly 50 light years from Earth. “The system enthusiastically pointed me to a place in the sky that had absolutely nothing interesting,” Caselden told The Daily Beast. “But at the bottom left, there was a faint object just screaming across the screen.”
Since he had found the object without really proving it, Caselden called it … The accident.
Caselden left his video game teammates and immediately emailed some astronomers where he was working on details of his discovery. Emails began three years of deepening in the study of a team of scientists, the initial results of which are finally beginning to appear in the press.
What Caselden found appears to be a brown dwarf, a star up to 75 times the mass of Jupiter that never managed to ignite and become the type of star that heats and illuminates our planet.
Brown dwarfs are cold and dark. And while these dead stars are not uncommon, they are usually a little warmer and brighter and farther away from Earth than what appears to be the accident. “Is it like that really stood out, “Caselden said of his brown dwarf.
The light profile of the accident suggests that it contains very little methane, which is usually abundant in brown dwarfs. This lack of methane could be a sign that the Accident formed when the Milky Way itself contained very little gas. “The accident is very old, probably more than ten billion years old,” Federico Marocco, a Caltech astrophysicist who studied the accident, told The Daily Beast.
The age of the accident is staggering. Its proximity to Earth is uniform month surprising. “We expected brown dwarfs from this old man to exist, but we also expected them to be incredibly rare,” Marocco said in a NASA statement. “The possibility of finding one so close to the solar system may be a coincidence, or it tells us they are more common than we thought.”
In other words, if a random glance at a piece of random space not far from Earth has just resulted in an illuminated star as strange as The Accident, a more complete survey could produce even greater wonders in numbers. even bigger.
“The crash shows us that the Milky Way still has mysteries to reveal,” J. Davy Kirkpatrick, another Caltech astronomer who has studied the crash, told The Daily Beast.
There are many clues that indicate that the Milky Way is much more unknown than we previously thought. In recent years, scientists have seen roaming “rogue” planets roaming the galaxy, without tying any stars.
They have also detected a very strange strange “zombie” star that apparently survived a collision with another star and now crosses the Milky Way like shrapnel from an explosion, on a path that could lead it to the unfathomable cold. and dark extension between our galaxy and the next.
New and better technology could help fans like Caselden and professionals like Marocco and Kirkpatrick find stranger things in the vastness of space that could potentially tell us more about our galaxy. It is worth noting that the survey data that Caselden first used to glimpse the crash came from an old NASA probe called the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.
To get a closer look, scientists used a ground-based telescope at the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii, as well as NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes.
Although follow-up surveys helped them better understand The Accident, they did not reveal any additional nearby brown stars that shared the peculiar color, temperature, and composition of the Accident. “Where are the other accidents?” Caselden asked. “We may need new infrared telescopes to find out.”
That’s right, NASA is preparing to launch a new infrared telescope: the high-tech James Telb space telescope, much delayed.
With James Webb at his disposal, Caselden, Marocco and Kirkpatrick could find other old, cold brown dwarfs. Especially now that they know what to look for. “The accident has shown us that we have to accept a wider range of possibilities when considering how very cold objects should look,” Kirkpatrick said. “We will be launching a wider network when we look for other tenuous inhabitants of the solar district.”
Caselden already knows what he wants to call the next brown dwarf he finds. “I want the new system I’ve spent all my free time over the last few years to find another crash and I’ll say ‘The Purpose.’