'Crazy star' was thrown out of the Milky Way

The US Hubble telescope detected a super-hot blue star moving at speeds of up to 2.56 million km / h.

Illustration HE 0437-5439 shot out of the Milky Way.Photo: NASA .

Nature reported that University of Michigan astronomers in the US found the star when analyzing the data sent by the Hubble telescope. At a rate of 2.56 million km / h, HE 0437-5439, the name of the blue star, moves frantically, three times faster than the sun.

HE 0437-5439 stands out from other nearby stars because it is among the 16 stars with super-high speeds. Its mass is five times that of the sun, and its distance from the center of the Milky Way is about 200,000 light-years.

In the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the team thinks that HE 0437-5439 was originally a three-star system in the Milky Way. Nearly 100 million years ago, three stars drifted near the black hole between the Milky Way. The black hole swallowed a star and pushed the other two stars out of the center of the Milky Way. In the process of moving, the two stars form one. Their velocity is large enough to overcome the gravitational pull of the Milky Way.

The Christian Science Monitor newspaper said astronomers have now found 16 super-fast stars. Most of them have been discovered in the last 5 years. Warren Brown, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says that for every 100 million stars, there is only one super-fast star. Scientists believe supernovae are blown out of the center of the Milky Way, but their hypothesis is only verified with the discovery of HE 0437-5439.