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Ultrafast Stars Discovered Racing Through Milky Way up to 2 Million Miles an Hour
The discovery, unveiled last month, could shed light on how stars form in the dust-shrouded core of our home galaxy.
Six speedy stars rocketing through space at up to 2 million miles
per hour were likely ejected from the giant black hole at the
Milky Way’s heart, astronomers say. They represent the first
known “hypervelocity stars” with masses similar to that of our
sun.
Black hole suns
The galactic center is cloaked in a halo of dust that obscures all but the brightest stars from astronomers’ telescopes. But hypervelocity stars could provide a window into the star formation going on at the Milky Way’s dark heart. [Video: Milky Way's Supermassive Black Hole Caught Eating]
That’s because hypervelocity stars are thought to form when the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy devours one star in a binary system and ejects its twin, flinging it through space at superfast speeds, said study author Keith Hawkins, an astronomy student at Ohio University.
“These are incredibly fast-moving objects that are actually gravitationally unbound to the Milky Way,” he said during the 221st annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, Calif., last month.onomical Society in Long Beach, Calif., last month.
STELLAR STREAMING HERE
Our Sun travels through space at 480,000 mph. It travels about 11 million miles per day and takes 226 million years to make one trip around the centre of our galaxy. On Dec. 21, 2012, Earth started it’s thirteenth trip around the centre of the galaxy. Earth is now a teenager.