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New Class of "Hypervelocity Stars" Discovered Escaping the Galaxy
Science_afficionado writes "Astronomers have discovered a surprising new class of 'hypervelocity stars' that are moving at more than a million miles per hour, fast enough to escape the gravitational grasp of the Milky Way galaxy. The 20 hyper stars are about the same size as the sun and, other than their extreme speed, have the same composition as the stars in the galactic disk. The big surprise is that they don't seem to come from the galaxy's center. The generally accepted mechanism for producing hypervelocity stars relies on the extreme gravitational field of the supermassive black hole that resides in the galaxy's core."
Maybe they're motherships :D
Heavens Gate was right all along! We missed the Mothership, guys!
Gently reply
This is obviously 'Wan-to' up to his old tricks again.
Maybe this is evidence of an advanced civilization.
space is not limited by the speed of light. What is the matter with you people?
They've spotted the explosion! Get in your General Products Hull and run for it! Our only salvation will be to find the Ringworld and move it out of the galaxy!
Assuming the observation gets studied and confirmed, this is probably far more common than one might initially expect.
The Milky Way has been on the move billions of years and occasionally meets up with star clusters or even dwarf galaxies.
Many of them probably settle in gravitationally, but some of them aren't going to and continue, largely, about their merry way if the relative speeds are right.
These stars could have been "acquired" 400 million years ago and it can take a long time to traverse a cross-segment of the Milky Way. And these stars would have to be smaller like our sun to have the right lifespan, and we wouldn't notice the really small ones (red dwarfs and such) because they would be hard to see so there is also a mix of observational factors in the equation.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
....eeeeeeee!
I never believed in it, anyway.
Maybe two super-massive black holes passed close to each other and spun these off?
Looking at the trajectories, wouldn't it be a possibility that these stars didn't originate in our galaxy, but rather, could have been tourists flung out in a similar fashion from another supermassive black hole outside of our own galaxy? Just passing through on various trajectories, from potentially various other galaxies. Not much thought put into this - maybe the distance from the nearest supermassive black hole outside of our own galaxy makes this an impossibility, but seems the article doesn't go into any theories at all.
what the hell is chasing it?
They're just trying to see what they can get away with with a Newtonian approximation of gravity.
Aren't all objects' movement (speed) based on another objects movement (speed)? I mean, how fast is the Milky Way moving, and in what direction? And could that star just be sitting idle-ish, and our galaxy zipping past it? Are these question answerable?
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
space is not limited by the speed of light. What is the matter with you people?
Nothing is limited by the speed of light. The galactic constant is a phenomenon, not a limiting force.
the radio waves with Fox News started reaching them.
Maybe those are not just stars, but civilizations of Type II on Kardashev's scale.
I mean those guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Definition
those aren't stars escaping the galaxy... those are golf balls being hit by people that watched those 8 free HD golf lesson videos to learn that weird golf trick to add an extra 20 yards.
Ah -- all those sorry imperia that are reminded of when their deficient units of measurement find
their only shelter in planetary travel and galactic theories.
Is the galaxy Anglosaxon? No, all rejoice -- it is not.
Puppeteer planets escaping.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
So, what you are saying is that these so-called 'Hypervelocity' stars are actually no different from others stars in our galaxy, just that somehow their velocity has been given a new direction, like a rubber ball bouncing off a wall.
The significance of this is that no new accelerating energy source is required in theory, since the 'rogue' stars already had the same mount of momentum energy as their 'normal' neighbours. Of course, we don't know what phenomenon would 'bounce' these stars into a new direction. It would be reasonable to think we may be seeing the result of some 'intelligent' action- a star-system scale project of engineering.
It would be of interest to consider the objects in the future path of such stars. Were these mere random natural events, one would expect that the contents of space in front of these stars would be completely random. However, if the forward paths show content that cannot be described as random, this increases the likelihood that these stars were given their new direction on purpose.
Too soon?
From the ratio of stars being ejected, get the average rate of galaxy evaporation. Calculate backward to compute original mass of the milky way.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
These stars were ejected by the polar vortex.
#DeleteChrome
Maybe those starts just didn't like the neighbourhood they were in and decided to move house
TFA only says that the stars are travelling at a speed high enough that they can escape the pull of the galaxy, but doesn't give any explanation of WHAT is pushing or pulling the stars.
From TFA:
"The generally accepted mechanism for producing hypervelocity stars relies on the extreme gravitational field of the supermassive black hole that resides in the galaxy's core"
If it's the "supermassive black hole in the Galaxy core" that's doing the pulling, the stars should have travelling towards the core.
But they are travelling instead away from the core !
Instead of a "pull", it is as if there's something that's "PUSHING" them instead, and I do not think it's the supermassive blackhole (whose expertise is on the pulling part).
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I'd think an N-body problem with 300 billion stars would almost inevitably produce a few stars that just by chance get a sufficient number of gravitational slingshots from other stars that they get up to escape velocity...
Those are spaceships!
Somebody stop them!
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What would happen if one of these beasts passed near the Solar system. For "near" consider the following scenarios: 1. Oort cloud. 2. Kuiper belt (I don't recall which one is closer and I'm too lazy to google it). 3. Just outside the orbit of Neptune. 4. Collision with Jupiter. 5. A passage inside the orbit of Mercury, no planetary collision or collision with Sol.
Finally, assuming none of these scenarios killed us by disruption the relationship between the Earth and Sun or flinging large bodies at us, how practical would it be to use a gravitational slingshot to launch a probe at high velocities?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You were right in your basic premise that all speed is relative, so it's just as accurate to say that these stars are wizzing through the galaxy at hypervelocity as it is to say that the galaxy is wizzing through those stars' neighborhoods at hypervelocity.
You were however taken to task for using phrases like "sitting idle-ish" which suggest an absolute frame of reference, which is of course wrong.
Note that the Andromeda Galaxy is heading in our direction at around 300 kilometers per second (a bit less than 1 million mph), so a high proportion of our galaxy's stars will be "hypervelocity stars" from its perspective (and vice versa) when it finally reaches us in around 4 billion years' time.
Wow. You guys are a bunch of fuckin nerds.
Kelly is fuckin hot!
One of the theories for the origin of these hypervelocity stars is 3-body chaotic gravity assist. When two bodies are entering a gravity assist trajectory around a third, very massive body, their interactions sometimes add up in such a way that one body falls into a tight orbit, and another is ejected at a hypervelocity. Given the number of ternary star systems in the galaxy, this looks like a plausible explanation.
There is even a paper suggesting we could build an interstellar starship from two asteroids (PDF, 10 pages) using this mechanism. It was written by Josef L Breeden and presented at the 100 Year Starship conference.
Easy, they're relocating... probably to avoid some new hyperspatial express route.
They're starting to take control of the universe, so those that have the technology create singularities to kick their star systems into an escape escalator.
The point is these are two WOMEN who found these most amazing and special super speed stars.
His take on such matters is generally well informed and interesting.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I wonder how it would have felt for humanity if Earth happened to orbit such a star, and we knew that every moment we were going farther and farther from the galaxy.
YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED lol
...it's not heading towards our sun, might be a bit messy
I have read quite a bit about science that interests me and one of the subjects was "the ultimate fate of the universe". One detail that stuck out was that all galaxies evaporate given enough time. Even with a small rate of evaporation (say, an average of 10 billion years for any given star), our galaxy has 300 billion stars, so you're bound to see a few flying away "naturally" at any point time.
If they really wanted to know how these particular stars got boosted without going through the galactic center, they'd take a look at one of the already-done-to-death simulations.
Hell, I betcha someone could scale down one of these simulations, post it as a crappy javascript app and say "hey look here's how it happens!", and not even need the chops to describe it analytically.