This Very Weird 'Accidental' Star Could Help Reveal the Secrets of the Cosmos

[Zorro]

The random discovery of an unlit star thought to be more than 10 billion years old could show us a whole new side to the universe.

The Milky Way galaxy just got a lot weirder. More to the point, our understanding of how weird the galaxy is got a lot better.

It’s possible the Milky Way is positively teeming with a startling number of dead stars, some of which might be nearly as old as the galaxy itself.

We have an amateur stargazer to thank for the discovery. Dan Caselden was playing the video game Counter-Strike late one night back in 2018 when a custom software program he’d created for analyzing data from a NASA star survey found something odd.

A huge cold object in space, moving fast 50 light-years from Earth. “The system enthusiastically pointed me to a place in the sky that had absolutely nothing interesting there at all,” Caselden told The Daily Beast. “But in the bottom left corner, there was a faint object just screaming across the screen.”

Because he’d found the object without really trying, Caselden named it… The Accident.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/this-very-weird-accidental-star-could-help-reveal-the-secrets-of-the-cosmos

[calimary]

1. Cool!