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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/Hubble, NASA)

A team of astronomers, including University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa astronomer Eugene Magnier, used the 10-meter Keck II and Pan-STARRS1 telescopes in Hawaiʻi 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.

“At that speed, you could travel from Earth to the moon in 5 minutes,” Magnier commented.

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”—were published in the March 6, 2015 issue of the journal Science.

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.

“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.

Read the Institute for Astronomy news release for more on the US708 discovery.

—By Louise Good

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