The new discovery of six more runaway stars in the Milky Way has landed the fastest object of this type yet detected in the galaxy.
Fascinating article, they’re speculating that our galaxy has launched potentially millions of hypervelocity stars into intergalactic space.
“The speeds of these hypervelocity stars are blistering, in excess of 1,000 kilometers per second. Given that something needs to be traveling at 550 kilometers per second to leave the Milky Way, hypervelocity stars are destined for intergalactic space.”
“If a significant fraction of Type Ia supernovae produce a D6 star, the Galaxy has likely launched more than 10 million of them into intergalactic space,” the researchers write.
“An interesting corollary is that there should be large numbers of faint, nearby D6 stars launched from galaxies all throughout the local volume passing through the Solar neighborhood.”