A star has been spotted speeding through the universe after being thrown out of a supermassive black hole.
It is going so fast that it will eventually be thrown out of the galaxy and never return, scientists said.
The star was thrown out of the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, known as Sagittarius A*. As such, scientists describe it as “a visitor from a strange land”, having come relatively near to us from the very middle of our Milky Way.
The star was spotted in the constelltion of Grus, or the crane, by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University. They saw that the star was moving 10 times faster than most of the stars in our galaxy, and looked to study it for more information.
“The velocity of the discovered star is so high that it will inevitably leave the galaxy and never return,” said Douglas Boubert from the University of Oxford, a co-author on the study.
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The eye of Hurricane Dorian as captured by Nasa astronaut Nick Hague from onboard the International Space Station (ISS) on 3 September
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The River Nile and its delta captured at night from the ISS on 2 September
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The galaxy Messier 81, located in the northern constellation of Ursa Major, as seen by Nasa’s Spitzer Space Telescope
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The flight path Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft is seen in this long exposure photograph as it launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 25 September
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Danielson Crater, an impact crater in the Arabia region of Mars, as captured by Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft
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A team rehearses landing and crew extraction from Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, which will be used to carry humans to the International Space Station at the White Sands Missile Range outside Las Cruces, New Mexico
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Bound for the International Space Station, the Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 25 September
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Hurricane Dorian as seen from the ISS on 2 September
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A string of tropical cyclones streams across Earth’s northern hemisphere in this picture taken from the ISS on 4 September
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The city of New York as seen from the ISS on 11 September
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The eye of Hurricane Dorian as captured by Nasa astronaut Nick Hague from onboard the International Space Station (ISS) on 3 September
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The River Nile and its delta captured at night from the ISS on 2 September
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The galaxy Messier 81, located in the northern constellation of Ursa Major, as seen by Nasa’s Spitzer Space Telescope
Nasa/JPL-Caltech
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The flight path Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft is seen in this long exposure photograph as it launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 25 September
Nasa/Bill Ingalls
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Danielson Crater, an impact crater in the Arabia region of Mars, as captured by Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft
Nasa/JPL-Caltech
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A team rehearses landing and crew extraction from Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, which will be used to carry humans to the International Space Station at the White Sands Missile Range outside Las Cruces, New Mexico
Nasa/Bill Ingalls
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Bound for the International Space Station, the Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 25 September
Nasa/Bill Ingalls
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Hurricane Dorian as seen from the ISS on 2 September
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A string of tropical cyclones streams across Earth’s northern hemisphere in this picture taken from the ISS on 4 September
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The city of New York as seen from the ISS on 11 September
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High velocity stars of this kind were only discovered about 20 years ago, and remain mysterious to scientists. This is the first star of its kind ever seen, with astronomers never spotting one of the mysterious stars so fast and close by before.
The object passed by a mere 29 thousand light years away. Astronomers were able to track its journey back to the beginning, at the middle of the Milky Way – where a huge black hole known as Sagittarius A* can be found.
“This is super exciting, as we have long suspected that black holes can eject stars with very high velocities. However, we never had an unambiguous association of such a fast star with the galactic center,” said Koposov, the lead author of this work and member of Carnegie Mellon’s McWilliams Center for Cosmology.
“We think the black hole ejected the star with a speed of thousands of kilometers per second about five million years ago. This ejection happened at the time when humanity’s ancestors were just learning to walk on two feet.”
The star began as one half of a binary system, but the two stars drifted two close to the extreme environment of Sagittarius A*. As they fell into the intense gravitational environment around the black hole, the companion star was eaten up, but the newly discovered one was thrown out at incredible speed through a process known as the Hills Mechanism.
“This is the first clear demonstration of the Hills Mechanism in action,” said Ting Li from Carnegie Observatories and Princeton University, and leader of the S5 Collaboration. “Seeing this star is really amazing as we know it must have formed in the galactic center, a place very different to our local environment. It is a visitor from a strange land.”
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