> 1M Miles per Hour<p>That's ~450 km/s, or 0.15% <i>c</i>.<p>Importantly it's also the first object discovered by this project that's unbounded to the Milky Way. Like ʻOumuamua in relation to the Solar system, it exceeds the escape velocity and will never return to the Milky Way.
If galactic location details weren't provided, I would have jokingly concluded that we finally spotted the nuclear manhole cover :)<p><a href="https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/the-fastest-man-made-objects-in-the-universe" rel="nofollow">https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/the-fastest-man-made-o...</a>
Not sure about this one... according to this study the escape velocity of the Milky Way is around 550 km/s.<p><a href="https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021A%26A...649A.136K/abstract" rel="nofollow">https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021A%26A...649A.136K/abst...</a><p>The authors of that study cited above are pretty confident it's above 497 +/- 8 km/s, at least in the solar neighborhood.<p>1M Miles per hour works out to 446 km/s. Granted these are all rough numbers, and it depends exactly where you are in the Milky Way, but it looks like it may be a bit short of actually escaping.
And would still take ~29 million years [1] to exit the galaxy (if it had started from the center). Space is large.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28diameter+of+Milky+Way+in+miles+%2F+2%29+%2F+%281000000+mph%29+in+years" rel="nofollow">https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28diameter+of+Milky+Wa...</a>
With more affordable sensor technology, citizen science has a huge potential to become a strong force just by being able to deploy a large number of people in a short time span.<p>However some of the problems is that it's not really recognized (yet) by academia and governments and thus also not adequately funded.<p>It would be great if there is a more systematic approach to citizen science but only in astronomy but also global challenges like climate change and biodiversity.
“Stellar engines are a class of hypothetical megastructures which use the resources of a star to generate available work,” for example, to “produce thrust [to] accelerate a star and anything orbiting it in a given direction” [1].<p>(I don’t think it works with a brown dwarf.)<p>[1] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine</a>
Backyard World website, where you can help search for the elusive "planet 9":
<a href="https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marckuchner/backyard-worlds-planet-9" rel="nofollow">https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marckuchner/backyard-wor...</a>
Apparently no longer in pre-print:<p><a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad6607" rel="nofollow">https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad6607</a>
All motion in space is relative. Wouldn't it also be equally accurate to say this object is motionless and everything else is passing it by at 1M mph?