Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – A star traveling at speed of 6 million kilometers per hour, after it was ejected by the supermassive black hole has been detected by an international team of astronomers.
The star is moving so fast that it will leave the Milky Way and head into intergalactic space.
Called S5-HVS1, the star was discovered in the Grus, or Crane, constellation by lead author Sergey Koposov of Carnegie Mellon University as part of the Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey led by Carnegie Princeton Fellow Li. It was moving 10-times faster than most of the stars in the galaxy.
“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,” Koposov said in a press release.
High-velocity stars have been a source of great curiosity for astronomers since their discovery two decades ago. Because S5-HVS1 is moving so quickly and passed relatively close to Earth—29,000 light-years, which is practically next door by astronomical standards—it presented an unprecedented opportunity to better understand these phenomena. Due to these unique circumstances, the researchers were able to trace its journey right back to the center of the Milky Way, where there lurks black hole that’s 4 million times the mass of the Sun.
“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.”
Thirty years ago, astronomer Jack Hills proposed that superfast stars could be ejected by black holes via a process bearing his name.
“This is the first clear demonstration of the Hills Mechanism in action,” Li said.
“Seeing this star is really amazing”, she added, “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.”
Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff