Colossal rogue object spotted shooting through space at 1million mph and Nasa scientists are baffled about what it is

A "UNIQUE" celestial object has been caught hurtling through space at one million miles per hour - so fast it may leave the galaxy, according to Nasa.

The colossal object - roughly 27,306 times the size of Earth - was spotted by citizen scientists who were analysing data from Nasa's WISE telescope.

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The "new object", dubbed CWISE J1249, has not yet been identified by experts, Nasa has revealed.

It's about the same size as a star, but most known stars orbit the centre of the Milky Way peacefully.

It has a surprisingly low mass, which Nasa said makes CWISE J1249 particularly hard to identify.

The object could be a low mass star, but it may also be a brown dwarf if it doesn’t steadily fuse hydrogen in its core.

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However, of the 4,000 other brown dwarfs discovered in the WISE imagery - none of them are close to travelling outside of the Milky Way and into intergalactic space.

CWISE J1249 might even be something in between a gas giant planet and a star.

But it has much less iron and other metals in it than other stars and brown dwarfs - so scientists have no concrete answers yet.

What is a dwarf planet?

Here's what you need to know...

• According to scientists, a space object must tick three boxes before it can be classified as a planet.
• The first is that it must orbit the Sun.
• The second is that it’s big enough — and generates enough gravity — to pull itself into a spherical shape.
• The third is that it must have “cleared the neighborhood” of its orbit, meaning its gravity has swept away any other similar objects.
• Dwarf planets meet the first two, but not the third.
• There are six known dwarf planets in our Solar System. The most famous is Pluto.
• It was considered a full planet for decades before scientists reclassified it in 2006.
• The other five are: Ceres, Eris, Makemake, Haumea and Hygiea.
• Of these, only Ceres and Hygiea are closer to the Sun than Neptune. They sit in the asteroid belt.
• Brown dwarfs form like stars do, but can be up to 70 times more massive than gas giants like Jupiter.
• Brown dwarfs are excluded from planet status because they exceed the maximum weight for a planet.

This unusual composition suggests that CWISE J1249 is quite old, likely from one of the first generations of stars in our galaxy, according to Nasa.

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“I can’t describe the level of excitement,” said Martin Kabatnik, a citizen scientist from Nuremberg, Germany.

“When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have been reported already.”

Kabatnik discovered the object several years ago alongside colleagues Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden, but only published their findings in a study this month.

The study is led by the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 science team, which formed in 2017 to identify celestial objects from Nasa's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope.

One theory is that CWISE J1249 originally came from a binary system with a white dwarf, which exploded as a supernova when it pulled off too much material from its companion

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Breakneck speeds

The breakneck speed CWISE J1249 is travelling at has also baffled scientists.

"One theory is that CWISE J1249 originally came from a binary system with a white dwarf, which exploded as a supernova when it pulled off too much material from its companion," Nasa wrote.

"Another possibility is that it came from a tightly bound cluster of stars called a globular cluster, and a chance meeting with a pair of black holes sent it soaring away."

Kyle Kremer, incoming assistant professor in UC San Diego’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, added: “When a star encounters a black hole binary, the complex dynamics of this three-body interaction can toss that star right out of the globular cluster."

Scientists are now set to examine the elemental composition - what the object is made of - for more clues about why it might be moving so fast.

What is an exoplanet?

Here's what you need to know...

• An exoplanet is a planet that is located outside of our solar system and is orbiting its own star, like how Earth orbits the Sun
• They are very hard to see with telescopes because they are often hidden by the brightness of their star
• Nasa sent the Kepler space telescope into orbit to find Earth-sized exoplanets that might support life
• Over 5,500 exoplanets have been discovered so far, and more missions to find even more exoplanets are planned
• A good way to spot an exoplanet is to look for wobbly stars, because a disruption to starlight can indicate that a planet is orbiting it and therefore blocking out light on occasion
• Exoplanets are very common in the universe, and the more we find that look like Earth, the closer we get to knowing whether we're alone out there