{"id":32484,"date":"2015-03-09T14:41:38","date_gmt":"2015-03-10T00:41:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/?p=32484"},"modified":"2021-09-27T16:46:27","modified_gmt":"2021-09-28T02:46:27","slug":"fastest-star-in-milky-way-propelled-by-a-thermonuclear-supernova","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/2015\/03\/09\/fastest-star-in-milky-way-propelled-by-a-thermonuclear-supernova\/","title":{"rendered":"Fastest star in Milky Way propelled by a thermonuclear supernova"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading time: <\/span> < 1<\/span> minute<\/span><\/span>
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Artist’s conception of a star (left) being ejected from a galaxy by a supernova explosion. In reality the supernova would have been faded away long before the star reached that position. (credit: ESA<\/abbr>\/Hubble, NASA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A team of astronomers, including University of Hawaiʻi<\/span> at Mānoa<\/a> astronomer Eugene Magnier<\/strong>, used the 10-meter Keck II<\/abbr> and Pan-STARRS1 telescopes in Hawaiʻi<\/span> to find a star that breaks the galactic speed record. It travels at about 1,200 kilometers per second (about 2.7 million mph), a speed that will enable the star to escape from our Milky Way galaxy.<\/p>\n

“At that speed, you could travel from Earth to the moon in 5 minutes,” Magnier commented.<\/p>\n

The team showed that, unlike the half-dozen other known escaping stars, this compact star was ejected from an extremely tight binary by a thermonuclear supernova explosion. These results—“The fastest unbound star in our Galaxy ejected by a thermonuclear supernova”<\/a>—were published in the March 6, 2015 issue of the journal Science<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Stars like the sun are bound to our galaxy by its gravity and orbit its center at relatively moderate velocities, tens to a few hundreds of kilometers per second. Only a few so-called hypervelocity stars are known that travel so fast that they are unbound. A close encounter with the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is usually considered the most plausible mechanism for enabling these stars to escape from the galaxy.<\/p>\n

“By observing the sky repeatedly over several years, the Pan-STARRS1 survey lets us make a movie of the motions of the stars in the sky. That enables us to study the behaviors of extremely rare and weird stars like US708,” Magnier explained.<\/p>\n

Read the Institute for Astronomy news release<\/a> for more on the US708 discovery.<\/p>\n

—By Louise Good<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Institute for Astronomy’s Eugene Magnier part of international team of astronomers to find a star that breaks the galactic speed record.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[34,35,9,56],"class_list":["post-32484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","tag-astronomy","tag-institute-for-astronomy","tag-uh-manoa","tag-video-2","entry","has-media"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t