MEXICO: Astronomers have recently discovered an ultrafast star travelling at a speed of 1,200 kilometers per second (26 million mph), the speed which astronomers say will enable it to escape from Milky Way.
The team of astronomers, including University of Hawaii at Manoa astronomer Eugene Magnier, used the 10-meter Keck II and Pan-STARRS1 telescopes in Hawaii to find a star that breaks the galactic speed record.
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.
Stars like the sun are bound to Earth’s 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 was usually considered the most plausible mechanism for enabling these stars to escape from the galaxy.
Stephan Geier (European Southern Observatory, Garching, Germany) led the team that observed the known high-velocity star, US 708, with the Echellette Spectrograph and Imager on the Keck II telescope to measure its distance and radial velocity component, that was, how fast it was moving away from Earth.
By carefully combining position measurements from digital archives with newer positions measured from images taken during the Pan-STARRS1 survey, they were also able to derive the tangential component of the star’s velocity, or how fast it was moving perpendicular to Earth.
Tesla driverless system to use updated radar technology
WASHINGTON: Electric carmaker Tesla announced Sunday it was upgrading its Autopilot software to use more advanced radar technology. In a...
