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One of the Milky Way's Fastest Stars Is an Invader From Another Galaxy (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes from a report via Science Magazine: On April 25, the European Space Agency released a data set gathered by the Gaia satellite containing the motions, and much more, of 1.3 billion stars. Astronomers have immediately sifted the data for fast-moving stars. They are prized as forensic tools: When rewound, their trajectories point back to the violent events that launched them. Last week, one team reported the discovery of three white dwarfs -- the dying embers of sunlike stars -- hurtling through the galaxy at thousands of kilometers per second, perhaps flung out from supernovae explosions. Another group reported more than two dozen fast-moving stars, some apparently kicked out by our galaxy's central black hole. And a third has confirmed that a star blazing through the outskirts of the Milky Way actually hails from another galaxy altogether, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The flood of discoveries has sent astronomers racing to their telescopes to check and classify the swift objects, says Harvard University astronomer James Guillochon. The findings have been reported in the journal Science.

44 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Those pesky migrants by CaffeinatedBacon · · Score: 2

    And make those Magellens pay for it.

  2. Fucking immigrants by Rik+Sweeney · · Score: 1, Funny

    Go back to your own galaxy.

    1. Re:Fucking immigrants by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Only a matter of time until Trump decides to build another wall.

    2. Re:Fucking immigrants by mrbester · · Score: 1

      This is like a Puerto Rican moving to mainland US. Got a problem with that?

      --
      "Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
    3. Re:Fucking immigrants by sproketboy · · Score: 4, Funny

      They're White dwarfs so it's OK.

    4. Re:Fucking immigrants by cusco · · Score: 2

      The really cool thing is that this is barely the foam on top of your latte, no one has had time to do more than scrape the surface of the data dump yet. Astronomers say it will take years just to analyze what they have, and data is going to keep pouring in like a fire hose. This is an exciting time to be alive.

      --
      "Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
    5. Re:Fucking immigrants by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 1

      Go back to your own galaxy.

      That may or may not be possible.

      A lot of galaxies are moving apart so quickly as space expands- that even travelling at the fastest allowed speed, the speed of light, the distance between them can never be crossed.

      This coming from a nearby Galaxy, that might not be the case, I don't know. Further apart the galaxies the more likely they are moving away from each other faster than light due to expanding space.

      --
      "That's the way to do it" - Punch
    6. Re:Fucking immigrants by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      I think the prefer to be called "little stars".

      Anyway, I'd bet those stars were stars of color once, then turned white.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
  3. Re: "Progressives" have already signed it up to vo by Order_66 · · Score: 1

    I see what you did there.

  4. Pierson's Puppeteers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    The question is, which of these stars has the Puppeteer homeworld?

    1. Re:Pierson's Puppeteers by cyberchondriac · · Score: 1

      We'll never know. Nessus ain't talkin'

      --

      Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
  5. Are these processing errors? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The catalog contains 1 billion stars. If you specifically look for 10 outliers, then maybe you indeed find 10 unusual stars, or maybe you're spotting those stars which had unlucky circumstances that caused processing errors. An error rate of 1/100,000,000 would be incredibly good. Why are these astronomers entirely sure that the error rate of Gaia is exactly zero?

    1. Re:Are these processing errors? by HuguesT · · Score: 1

      An excellent point.

    2. Re:Are these processing errors? by squiggleslash · · Score: 1

      Where are you getting it from that the astronomers think the error rate of Gaia is exactly zero?

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  6. Getting this out of the way. . . by Salgak1 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I, for one, welcome our new, high-speed extragalactic invader. . . . .

    1. Re:Getting this out of the way. . . by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

      And I, for one, wave a hearty goodbye!

      --
      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
  7. Large Magellanic Cloud by HxBro · · Score: 4, Funny

    Not another cloud company, wonder what the latency is...

    1. Re:Large Magellanic Cloud by tarks · · Score: 1

      326 000 years. Not sure what the business model for this would be.

  8. Surprise by nospam007 · · Score: 2

    Nice to read headlines with "Invader From Another Galaxy" and it's not in the National Enquirer.

    1. Re:Surprise by The+Fat+Bastard · · Score: 1

      Stick around for four to eight billion years when the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are merging. The Galactic Enquirer will have extensive coverage on which stars are in or out of rehab.

  9. Re:So......it is a Space Invader? by jellomizer · · Score: 1

    You can always shoot missiles from behind the dirt so you have a place where you can have some protection.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  10. It would be interesting to study these. by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Being they are a bit more closer to us, we can use these to see what differences other galaxies may have then ours. While I am not expecting anything exotic like an Anti-Matter star, But some different heavy atoms may be present at a different ratio.

     

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    1. Re:It would be interesting to study these. by Mal-2 · · Score: 2

      Dwarf galaxies are metal-poor. It's not that they don't produce supernovae, it's that they can't hang onto the enriched debris. (At least that's my understanding of this excellent lecture.) So I would expect a main sequence star from the LMC to be of low metallicity, but obviously not white dwarfs.

      --
      How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
  11. Relativity by decipher_saint · · Score: 1

    Maybe we're hurtling at great speed and it's standing still. Or maybe I need to back off so much coffee in the morning - either or

    --
    crazy dynamite monkey
    1. Re:Relativity by JonnyCalcutta · · Score: 2

      If you get up really early on a clear morning - between 4am and 6am - you can sometimes actually see the stars stop. This is because its break time for the guy that winds the sky dome.

    2. Re:Relativity by decipher_saint · · Score: 1

      I knew it

      --
      crazy dynamite monkey
  12. Re:Those pesky migrants by The-Ixian · · Score: 2

    Since when did having a brain or planning things become prerequisites for classification as being an invader?

    --
    My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
  13. why invader? by AlwinBarni · · Score: 2

    Why invader? Why not a guest or visitor?

    Is there some magic spell cast on the humankind recently making everybody angry about everything?

    1. Re:why invader? by cfalcon · · Score: 1

      > Is there some magic spell cast on the humankind recently making everybody angry about everything?

      Lol, well put. I mean, it certainly seems that way.

  14. Re: Holy shit! We finally found by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    An Anonymous Coward burbled:

    "Mission: Earth (Ten Volumes)" by L. Ron Hubbard. Amazing science fiction series.

    If by "amazing" you mean "amazingly bad, to the point of being unreadable," then I wholeheartedly concur.

    It's a series so staggeringly badly-written that only a Scientologist so utterly, slavishly devoted to the Cult of Elron that he (or she - after all, there are plenty of female idiots, too) not only drank his entire serving of Kool-Aid, but got down on his knees and begged for seconds.

    I've been a science fiction fan since a month after I learned the alphabet, at the age of six. I've despised L. Ron Hubbard's incompetent, adolescent power fantasy version of SF since my first encounter with it at the age of seven or so, because it's all badly written (and I do mean ALL of it) - and none of it is based on a single scintilla of actual science. In place of the at-least-tangential connection with scientific knowledge that underlies the work of such Golden Age, space opera exponents as E. E. Smith, Edmund Hamilton, and Jack Williamson, Elron didn't bother with all that science-y, fact-ish stuff. Apparently that was labor he couldn't be bothered to perform - so he simply made shit up, instead.

    But that's not the real reason you should avoid reading Hubbard's mindless drivel. The real reason - or, at least, the major reason - is that everything he wrote is, without exception, awkwardly-constructed, pointlessly grandiose, and just plain stupid.

    Mind you, I was a mere seven years old when I reached that conclusion.

    Nothing of his that I've read since has altered my opinion of his work in any way. Not his Ole' Doc Methuselah stories, not Battlefield Earth (which I forced myself to trudge through, because it was an Astroturfed NYT bestseller, and because I don't believe it is either fair or ethical to criticize a book you haven't read), not his magnum dopus, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Bullshit and Handwaving. And Mission: Earth is no exception to the rule.

    It's all terrible.

    If you disbelieve me; if you think somehow that nothing could even possibly be that bad, by all means, read it for yourself. Or try to, at any rate.

    But do me, yourself, and the world at large a favor, if you will: don't buy any of Elron's gawdawful books. Not one. Instead, borrow a copy from your local public library. At least that way his estate - which is to say the Church of Scientology - doesn't get a single penny of your hard-earned money. Or buy a copy at a garage sale, or a Friends of the Library sale (because, once again, Scientology doesn't make a cent on sales of secondhand books). Don't even use your Amazon Prime privileges or your Kindle Unlimited account to read the ebook version for "free" (because, believe it or not, Amazon pays per-page royalties to authors when you "borrow" books).

    Trust me on this. It'll make an unbeliever of you. I guarantee it ...

    (Posting as AC only so as not to undo prior upmods in this thread.)

    --

    Check out my novel ...

  15. Re:Al-Qaeda in Outer Space by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 1

    That's why I only read RT news most mornings.

    Ah yes, state sponsored propaganda. The only news worth reading.

    --
    "That's the way to do it" - Punch
  16. Not knowing anything by cfalcon · · Score: 1

    Without knowing anything about where other galaxies are, the odds of one shooting a star directly at us struck me as odd- if galaxies were emitting stars occasionally, shouldn't there be a bunch more lone stars zipping all around?

    In any event, apparently the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is both reasonably close as far as galaxies go, is in *orbit* around the milky way, and is about 1% the mass of the milky way.

    So maybe we stole the star, eh? "Kidnapped star" would sound just as fun as "Invading star", after all, and gravity is gravity.

    1. Re:Not knowing anything by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      there are a bunch, and the Milky Way interacts with "satellite galaxies" and even made some of them...plus we'll "collide" with Andromeda in "only" a couple billion years...which mostly won't hurt individual star systems but will eject many.

      so yes ejections happen "often" on cosmic timescales

    2. Re:Not knowing anything by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      The Sun will have expanded nearly to Mars by them, won't it?

      Not really any point in panicking one way or the other. I know my medical insurance won't cover me at even half that age, especially against things like being totally fucking burnt to fuck.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    3. Re:Not knowing anything by BoogieChile · · Score: 1

      There are...

      This study identified 675 stars on the outskirts of the Mily Way galaxy that appear to have come from the inner galaxy.

      In 1997, it was found that in the Virgo cluster of galaxies, there may be over one trillion extragalactic stars, or more than 10% of the total stellar population of the whole cluster.

      And finally...Half the stars in the universe may be intergalactic wanders, which might solve a large part of the dark matter problem.

    4. Re:Not knowing anything by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      the next billion years will probably be the last for multicellular life, neat scenarios here:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      Hardly anything to worry about, modern humans have been around for less than 300,000 years, and 540 million years ago all the types of animal phyla suddenly appeared when before that most life was single celled

  17. Now we know.. by sconeu · · Score: 1

    Why there's an energy barrier at the edge of the Milky Way. The Organians put it there to stop those pesky extragalactic invader stars!

    --
    General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
  18. Don't bypass my motivator! by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

    And a third has confirmed that a star blazing through the outskirts of the Milky Way actually hails from another galaxy altogether

    I wonder how fast it can do the Kessel Run!

    --
    (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
  19. Re: Holy shit! We finally found by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Seppuku, unless you mean you started to do Sudoku puzzles in your head to combat the inanity

  20. Re:Holy shit! We finally found by meglon · · Score: 1

    https://www.amazon.com/Bare-Fa... is a far better book, and it's not even fiction. It's the tale of a grifter, conman, and the gullible idiots who follow him.

    --
    Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
  21. Re: Those pesky migrants by backslashdot · · Score: 1

    Lighten up dude. It adds flavor to the title unless you are an idiot to take it literally.

  22. Is it Space Battleship Yamamoto? by WillAffleckUW · · Score: 1

    Dang. This could get messy for our galaxy.

    --
    -- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
  23. Re: Holy shit! We finally found by david_thornley · · Score: 1

    Actually, I liked "Slaves of Sleep". (That's fantasy, doesn't refer to science, and doesn't really make sense in ways that I could ignore.) Then I tried reading "Ole Doc Methuselah". That cured me.

    --
    "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
  24. Three ranks! by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

    Fiiiiix bayonets!

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."