Newly-discovered ‘hypervelocity stars’ flee our galaxy — RT News

Newly-discovered ‘hypervelocity stars’ flee our galaxy — RT News:

Astronomers have discovered dozens of solitary stars that move fast enough to escape the gravitational grasp of the Milky Way galaxy. The stars travel at over 1.5 million kilometers per hour, but scientists have no idea what force drives them.

"These new hypervelocity stars are very different from the ones that have been discovered previously,” said Vanderbilt University graduate student Lauren Palladino, lead author of the study.

“The original hypervelocity stars are large blue stars and appear to have originated from the galactic center. Our new stars are relatively small – about the size of the sun – and the surprising part is that none of them appear to come from the galactic core,” the scientist added, according to the research’s press release.

Palladino works under the supervision of Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, assistant professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt University, who said that the phenomenon of stars fleeing the galaxy is very rare.

A handout photo released on September 11, 2013 by the European Southern Observatory shows an artist impression of how the Milky Way galaxy would look, seen from a very different perspective than we get from the Earth. (AFP/ESO)