Hmmmmm....
Star kicked out by giant black holePosted on July 22nd, 2010
A runaway star found racing through space at an incredible 2.5 million km an hour (1.6 million mph), suffered a brush with a monster black hole at the heart of our galaxy, astronomers believe.
Data collected using the Hubble space telescope suggests the speeding sun was part of a triple-star system that was drifting through the Milky Way a hundred million years ago.
But the threesome passed dangerously close to the centre of our galaxy where the supermassive black hole lurks.
The space scientists say it swallowed up one of the stars and booted the other two out of the Milky Way.
As they flew, the two stars merged to form one super-hot blue star.
Labelled HE 0437-5439, it is now speeding about 200,000 light-years from galactic central point and high above the whirling disk of the Milky Way, according to a Hubble news release.
Around 16 hypervelocity stars are known, all of which have been discovered in the past five years. They are all suspected to have been flung from our galaxy’s centre but this is the first time the theory has been successfully tested.
As we reported two years ago, another team of astronomers previously suggested the star had been fired on its path by another yet-undiscovered black hole in a satellite galaxy of our own called the Large Magellanic Cloud.
But US Astronomer Warren Brown, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a member of the Hubble team that observed the star, said: “Using Hubble, we can for the first time trace back to where the star comes from. Its motion points directly from the Milky Way center,”
“The star is travelling at an absurd velocity, twice as much as the star needs to escape the galaxy’s gravitational field.
There is no star that travels that quickly under normal circumstances – something exotic has to happen.”http://skymania.com/wp/2010/07/star-kicked-out-by-giant-black-hole.html
Thu Jul 22, 2010 10:33 pm
