Superfast star found leaving Milky Way at 1,700km per second

Amanda Goh reports on the ball of light that has hurtled out of the black hole and how scientists have been able to detect it

Amanda Goh
2nd December 2019

A star has been spotted heading out of the Milky Way at more than 6m km/h, or 1700km per second, after an encounter with the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy.

The star, known as S5-HVS1, had beed ejected by the black hole five million years ago. The discovery of the star was made known by Carnegie Mellon University Assistant Professor of Physics Sergey Koposov as part of the Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey.

Astronomers had wondered about high velocity stars since the discovery of them two decades ago. With this new information about S5-HVS1, astronomers could track the star's journey back to the centre of the milky way, where the Sagittarius A* lurks.

"We actually discovered the star serendipitously," astronomer Danial Zucker of Macquarie University told Science Alert. According to Zucker, the stars can tell us about their 'temperatures, compositions, and ages, as well as how fast they are moving toward or away from us,'

S5-HVS1 is an A-type main-sequence star notable as the one detected as of November 2019. The star is in the Grus constellation in the southern sky, and about 29,000 light-years from Earth. It is possible that the S5-HVS1 was originally part of a binary system which was disrupted by the supermassive black hole, causing the star to be ejected. S5-HVS1's position and speed indicated that it was kicked out of the galactic centre, with a great deal of force.

It has been hurtling across space ever since, but the mechanism that kicked it out is still unclear. "The basic idea (sometimes referred to as the Hills Mechanism) is that a bindery star gets close to a super black hole and one of the stars gets captures by the black hole," Zucker explains.

"As the captured star is pulled into orbit around the black hole, the other star is flung off into space at high speed,"

Zucker also affirms that this discovery will give clues about what is happening at the Galactic Centre, enabling us to have a better idea of the galaxy's shape and mass distribution.

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