May 7, 2014 – A University of Utah-led team discovered a “hypervelocity star” that is the closest, second-brightest and among the largest of 20 found so far. Speeding at more than 1 million mph, the star may provide clues about the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way and the halo of mysterious “dark matter” surrounding the galaxy, astronomers say.“The hypervelocity star tells us a lot about our galaxy – especially its center and the dark matter halo,” says Zheng Zheng, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy and lead author of the study published recently in Astrophysical Journal Letters by a team of U.S. And Chinese astronomers.“We can’t see the dark matter halo, but its gravity acts on the star,” Zheng says. “We gain insight from the star’s trajectory and velocity, which are affected by gravity from different parts of our galaxy.”In the past decade, astronomers have found about 20 of these odd stars. Hypervelocity stars appear to be remaining pairs of binary stars that once orbited each other and got too close to the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center. Zheng Zheng, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Utah, led a team of American and Chinese scientists who discovered the closest bright hypervelocity star of 20 yet found.
That title belongs to the handful of stars whirling around the. These stars would be one way for alien life to spread from galaxy to galaxy. The disruption of a binary star system by the massive black hole at the Galactic Centre, SgrA., can lead to the capture of one star around SgrA. and the ejection of its companion as a hypervelocity star (HVS). We consider the possibility that these starsmay haveplanets and study the dynamics of these planets. Using a direct N-body.
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Scientists believe each hypervelocity star began as part of a binary pair of stars near the center of our Milky Way galaxy, where extreme gravity from a supermassive black hole sucked in one star in the pair and, like a bolo, simultaneously hurled the other star - a new hypervelocity star - toward the edge of the galaxy.Photo Credit: Lee J. Siegel, University of Utah.