Researchers have discovered the fastest known star ever to have escaped from the Milky Way, which appears to have formed as a result of a massive thermonuclear explosion from another star.
It wasn’t just a single star that shot off into intergalactic space. The researchers also identified two runaway stars that accelerated to dizzying speeds, reports A futuristic.
In a study that has not yet been peer-reviewed, the researchers found that the star called J1235 traveled through the Milky Way at 1,694 kilometers per second, while the star J0927 traveled outward at 2,285 kilometers per second. The research group led by Harvard astrophysicist Karim El-Badry studied data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope and identified a total of six new runaway stars in our galaxy. Four of these may have been ejected by a special type of supernova.
These stars may allow researchers to find new ways to calculate the birth rate of stars. Thus, they can discover more wild stars like themselves. The four bodies emitted by the explosions are called hypervelocity stars. According to the researchers, it was accelerated by Type Ia supernovae, which occur in binary star systems where one of the stars is a white dwarf.
ScienceAlert explains that in some of these systems, the other star begins to collect material from its white dwarf companion, which can form huge stores of hydrogen gas. At some point, hydrogen gas explodes in a thermonuclear explosion, triggering a second explosion at the white dwarf’s core.
As a result, another star in the system is launched into space at an almost incomprehensible speed, and even leaves our galaxy.
The researchers hypothesize that there may be many more runaway stars in the Milky Way that we have yet to discover. In fact, some of them may be faster than those identified for the study.
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