Slashdot Mirror
Star Flung From Milky Way at High Speed
fenimor writes "Using the MMT Observatory in Tucson, astronomers have discovered a star three times bigger than the sun, leaving our galaxy at a speed of over 1.5 million miles per hour (670 kilometers per second). The first-of-its-kind finding not only confirms an earlier theory about the existence of such speeding stars, but also reinforces the notion that the Milky Way spins around a black hole."
It's a glider!
--
make install -not war
"We're tempted to call it the outcast star because it was forcefully tossed from its home."
Instead they are going to call it a galaxy challenged star.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Ok, now how do we apply this knowledge to do the same to Microsoft/Paris Hilton/Terrel Owens/Celine Dion.... ?
Starlight, star bright, first-of-its-kind star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, get laid tonight.
Do your best, hope for the best, suspect the worst.
Presumably if it's leaving our galaxy then that'd be the normal way to look at it.
Alternatively maybe it's staying still and we are being flung away from it at 1.5M mph.
I just wonder why the star and the planets are not torn apart by such huge speeds?
a) we're not sure it has planets.
b) it's not velocity that kills, it's acceleration.
c) this acceleration can only be explained by current theory if it was a gravitational acceleration.
d) gravitational acceleration acts on all elements of an object equally, meaning that there was no force from the acceleration itself acting to tear the object apart. Just like when you're in freefall, you don't feel gravity acting on you.
Now TIDAL gravity can tear objects apart, but since the gravitationally assisted acceleration likely happened in the galactic core, the tides were probably pretty gentle... the tidal force at a black hole's horizon can be expressed as a function of mass over surface area; the bigger the hole, the less the tides.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Plugging 670*10^3m/s into Lorent'z equation:
t = t'/(sqrt(1-(v^2/c2))
where v=6.7*10^5m/s
and c = 2.99*10^8,
I got a time dilation of factor of 1.00000249. That is, time in the moving system (the star) will be observed by a stationary observer to be running slower by a factor of 1.00000249.
Not as impressive as I hoped it would be when I started the calculations.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Goddamned Puppeteers. Before you know it, they'll be fleeing with all the good stars.
Is there *really* a difference, physically, on an object moving at 1.5MM mph and one standing completely still, if they're not interacting with anything else? No. Their inertias are the same, so their physical properties and interactions are the same.
Momentum, however, could be a bitch. Imagine this star slamming into another star (or, a la the Death Star, a small planet in the Aldeberan system). Ka-pow, with the graphic like on the old Batman series! Would make Levy-Shoemaker look like a BB gun (you're gonna put your eye out!)...
Recently I saw on Discovery that many galaxies (if not all) were orbiting around supermassive black holes. And that the orbiting speed of the stars is proportional to the black holes' mass. This is known as the "M-sigma" relation.
This meant that the supermassive black holes actually contributed to the process of galaxy formation.
The theory is more or less the following:
In the center of a galaxy-sized gas cloud, a star collapsed, forming a black hole. The black hole began eating the gas around it, forming a quasar (quasars are the matter just about to be swallowed by a black hole, disintegrating and generating enormous amounts of energy).
The quasar, due to its high temperature and rotational speed, heated the surrounding gas cloud, activating a chain reaction that gave birth to all the stars in the new-forming galaxy.
Eventually, the quasar pushed away the stars, so the black hole could only be fed by the quasar itself. After that, the black hole enters a dormant phase (it has nothing else to eat), and the galaxy is already formed (of course, I'm talking about a process that takes billions of years).
simply owing to the earth's rotation, you are, at this moment, moving at a rate of approximately 1000 mph? Probably less since you are probably not at the equator.
Also, Due to the earth's orbit around the sun, were are traveling at approximately 67000mph.
According to findings of COBE, our galaxy is traveling at 300 k/s or about 1.34 million mph.
Why aren't you torn apart?
I thought last year they found four "drawf" galaxies in vicinity of the Milky Way, about to be absorbed.
The big Kahuna of course will be the merger with Andromeda about two billion years hence. Our mutual gravitational attraction is drawing us together. In practical terms, both galaxies are essentially empty space. However Andromeda will grow from its present size in the sky of six full moons (192 arc minutes; but just a faint smudge) to fill the entire sky. See the collision simulation here.
Who wants to be the first to claim this is simply a huge plasma burst fired by an even larger weapon? Maybe it's just some alien race out there who wants to illustrate that they too, emjoy blowing things up with oversized guns. ^_^
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
"Fore!"
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
That's not entirely true. The force excerted by gravity goes as 1/r^2, where r is the distance between both masses.
If you have for example two large m1 and m2 each attached one end of a very long pole in a gravitational field caused by another mass M, the mass nearest to the M would experience a slightly stronger force than the other one. So that could, in theory, break the pole.
What you're talking about is tidal gravity. And tidal gravity is exactly what caused one star of a companion to be accelerated away while the other one was captured into an orbit.
On the scale of the objects themselves, though, the tides were probably extremely gentle. AFAIK companion stars are generally light-months apart. Even if this star was a planetary system, it's nearest planets are probably only a few light-minutes away...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
It's moving like hell compared to any large body in the galaxy, or the average.
I remember this story:
Professor: The temperature in this kind of reaction is about 3 million degrees.
Student: Is that Celcius or Kelvin?
Professor: It doesn't matter!
IOW, the difference between C and K at ~3m* is insignificant. In the same way, the speed of this star is practically the same from any point of reference near any star in the galaxy.
Mass of the star: approx 6x10^30 kg Velocity: 670,000 m/s Kinetic energy = 0.5 x m x v^2 Energy is very approximately 1.3x10^42 Joules, which I believe is enough to heat a Googleplex of Libraries of Congress for 3.141 Millenia.
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
For those, who didnit get it.
Puppeteers are alien race from novel "Ringworld" by Larry Nivel. They were moving their home star system to a new galaxy to escape from the Core explosion.
The speed of light (c) is 300 000 km/s. 670/300000 = 0.0022. It's going at 0.0022c.
Don't worry, you're the not the first person to post disinformation on this site and get modded up as informative. Also, you should have worked with the metric values instead of messing around with the imperial values. Ye olde english system is great for measuring stuff in your trousers, but not as great for astrophysics.
I thought it was well established that at the center of the galaxy there is a planet, that God is on that planet, and that (as it is becoming abundantly clear), he needs a fucking starship!
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
From the SDSS J090745.0+24507 Daily News:
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
All of the real astronomers are busy right now. Press 1 to be connected to a geek instead or 2 to leave a message.
-1-
Thank you.
The answer is : Black holes can be compilations of many stars. The one at the center of our galaxy that they are talking about is currently believed to be 3.7 million times the mass of our Sun (give or take 1.5 million).
This is just like we slingshot space probes past planets to get a gravitational speed boost, this star got pulled in towards the black hole but barely missed and got a the mother of all gravitational slingshots. I would guess that the fact that it had a companion was unimportant, and could have happened if it had been it had been a single star on the right trajectory.
IANAA.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
Come on! You gotta do the whole thing!
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
Education is the silver bullet.
As for his body being accelerated and his blood isn't... That's only the case in as much as right now your body is trying to accelerate at 9.8 m/s/s toward the center of the earth. Your bone structure and muscles lets you resist it. Your blood is also trying to accelerate towards the center of the earth at the same rate. Your arteries and veins and your heart let you resist that as well.
Your body and blood aren't accelerating at different rates. They both deal with the same acceleration in the same way, with it acting as 'weight'. The problem with weight/acceleration is that your body was designed to handle only so much of it.
Now let's kick it up a notch. blood pooling...
Imagine a test pilot in a centrafuge machine. It takes him up to 6 G's and holds him there for an hour. Just like he was on a planet with 6x earth's gravity.
His body is accelerating at 6 G's. ;)
His blood is also accelerating at 6 G's (otherwise it would all leak out the back of his chair and that would be a 'bad thing'
His blood resists accelerating as you say, but so does his body (Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest tend to stay at rest, bodies in motion tend to stay in motion and all that). Nevertheless, the back of his chair is causing the lot of them to accellerate at 6 G's.
His heart, however is now trying to pump blood that 'weighs' 6x as much. The heart can't pump the heavier blood as easily or 'high' (relatively) as it could normally. His veins can't constrict as much as they normally would to force blood back into the right areas of the body, because the blood is pushing against them with much greater force. The veins also have valves to prevent blood from flowing back the wrong way, but these may give way under the additional pressure.
The blood is not accelerating at a different rate from the body, it's still in his veins and artieris, and so still in his body. His body is being accellerating at 6 G's and the blood, being trapped inside, is going along for the ride. But it acts as a much heavier fluid. So it starts to pool in the lower extremeties since it can't be pumped efficiently. Depending on how strong his heart is (and resilient his veins are), he might be able to handle 6 G's for a good long while. But if they aren't in quite as good of shape he might not be able to pump the blood well enough and might black out after a few seconds or minutes.
Once again the blood isn't accelerating at a different rate than the body (both are resisting being accelerated), anymore than your blood and body accelerate at different speeds on earth, it just has a higher 'weight' then the body was structurally designed to pump.
The next stage is to crank up the centrifuge chair/other-planet to 1000g's density. 1000 G's. Now the test pilot's ribs are trying to hold up themselves and the muscles etc attached to them. But they weight 1000x as much. The bones werent' constructed to hold such a high weight, so they snap. The 'body' isn't accelerating at a different rate than the... 'body', but it breaks down because it wasn't designed for such mechanical forces. Everything is being accelerated (and trying to resist it). Everything is accelerating at the same rate. It just can't handle the rate.