Dan Caselden was up late on November 3, 2018, playing the video game Counter-Strike, when he made astronomy history. Every time he died, he would jump on his laptop to check in on an automated search he was running of NASA space telescope images.
Suddenly, in the early hours of the morning, something bizarre popped into view. “It was very confusing,” said Caselden. “It was moving faster than anything I’ve discovered. It was faint and fast, which made it very weird.”
Caselden emailed the astronomers he was working with as part of the
Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project. Once they ruled out the possibility that it was an image artifact, they realized they were looking at something wholly unusual, an exceedingly faint object 50 light-years away blazing through the galaxy at 200 kilometers per second. It was given the name WISE 1534-1043, but by virtue of its singular characteristics and chance discovery, it soon earned the nickname “
The Accident.”
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