{"id":32484,"date":"2015-03-09T14:41:38","date_gmt":"2015-03-10T00:41:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/?p=32484"},"modified":"2021-09-27T16:46:27","modified_gmt":"2021-09-28T02:46:27","slug":"fastest-star-in-milky-way-propelled-by-a-thermonuclear-supernova","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/2015\/03\/09\/fastest-star-in-milky-way-propelled-by-a-thermonuclear-supernova\/","title":{"rendered":"Fastest star in Milky Way propelled by a thermonuclear supernova"},"content":{"rendered":"<span class=\"span-reading-time rt-reading-time\" style=\"display: block;\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Reading time: <\/span> <span class=\"rt-time\"> &lt; 1<\/span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minute<\/span><\/span><figure id=\"attachment_32528\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-32528\" style=\"width: 630px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/supernova-explosion.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"620\" height=\"339\" class=\"size-full wp-image-32528\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/supernova-explosion.jpg 620w, https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/supernova-explosion-260x142.jpg 260w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-32528\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Artist&#8217;s conception of a star (left) being ejected from a galaxy by a supernova explosion. In reality the supernova would have been faded away long before the star reached that position. (credit: <abbr title=\"European Space Agency \">ESA<\/abbr>\/Hubble, NASA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"clear-photo\">A team of astronomers, including <a href=\"http:\/\/manoa.hawaii.edu\/\">University of <span aria-label=\"Hawaii\">Hawai&#699;i<\/span> at M&#257;noa<\/a> astronomer <strong>Eugene Magnier<\/strong>, used the 10-meter Keck <abbr title=\"two\">II<\/abbr> and Pan-STARRS1 telescopes in <span aria-label=\"Hawaii\">Hawai&#699;i<\/span> to find a star that breaks the galactic speed record. It travels at about 1,200 kilometers per second (about 2.7 million mph), a speed that will enable the star to escape from our Milky Way galaxy.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;At that speed, you could travel from Earth to the moon in 5 minutes,&rdquo; Magnier commented.<\/p>\n<p>The team showed that, unlike the half-dozen other known escaping stars, this compact star was ejected from an extremely tight binary by a thermonuclear supernova explosion. These results&#8212;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/content\/347\/6226\/1126.abstract?sid=0f42c551-e96a-4001-8164-f9e083f24702\">&ldquo;The fastest unbound star in our Galaxy ejected by a thermonuclear supernova&rdquo;<\/a>&#8212;were published in the March 6, 2015 issue of the journal <em>Science<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Stars like the sun are bound to our galaxy by its gravity and orbit its center at relatively moderate velocities, tens to a few hundreds of kilometers per second. Only a few so-called hypervelocity stars are known that travel so fast that they are unbound. A close encounter with the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is usually considered the most plausible mechanism for enabling these stars to escape from the galaxy.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;By observing the sky repeatedly over several years, the Pan-STARRS1 survey lets us make a movie of the motions of the stars in the sky. That enables us to study the behaviors of extremely rare and weird stars like US708,&rdquo; Magnier explained.<\/p>\n<p>Read the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ifa.hawaii.edu\/info\/press-releases\/fastest_star\/\">Institute for Astronomy news release<\/a> for more on the US708 discovery.<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8212;By Louise Good<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Institute for Astronomy&#8217;s Eugene Magnier part of international team of astronomers to find a star that breaks the galactic speed record.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[34,35,9,56],"class_list":["post-32484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","tag-astronomy","tag-institute-for-astronomy","tag-uh-manoa","tag-video-2","entry","has-media"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32484"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":148765,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32484\/revisions\/148765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}