They don't do it quietly when they die.
The death of a star is a brilliant event that light up the universe. The core of the star-that-was can collapse into a black hole if it wants to.
If that explosion takes place in a certain way, it can send the collapsed core barreling across the Milky Way like a bat out of hell, on a wild journey into space.
It's one of the objects that has been measured using data from the Chandra X-ray observatory, and it's a type of star called a pulsar, which can rip through its own entrails at a speed of over one million miles per hour.
It is one of the fastest objects ever found. The fastest star in the universe is not a supernova remnant that has been kicked by an explosion but a star in the center of the universe. It moves at a rapid rate of 24,000 kilometers per second.
Chandra's very sharp vision allowed us to see the motion of the pulsar in the X-rays.
It's so far away that we had to measure the width of a quarter to see it.
A glowing supernova remnant some 20,000 light-years away was used to detect it. There had been previous observations. They wanted to study the object to see if it could show the history of the supernova.
"We only have a handful of supernova explosions that have a reliable historical record tied to them, so we wanted to check if G292.0+1.8 could be added to this group," said Patnaude.
They looked at images of the remnant in 2006 and 2016 and compared it to its current location in the sky. The dead star seems to be moving 30 percent faster than previously thought.
The time it took to travel from the center of the remnant suggests the supernova took place more recently. The previous estimates put the date at around 3000 years ago, but the new estimates put it at around 2000 years ago.
The team was able to conduct a detailed investigation into how the dead star may have been ejected from the center of the supernova. The scenarios they came up with were similar.
The neutrinos are ejected from the explosion. The debris from the explosion is thrown in different directions. The more likely explanation is that asymmetrical debris is the reason for the large neutrino energy.
The collapsed core of a dead star can be kicked out into space at extremely high speeds by a large explosion, and it will take a long time.
It's true speed may be even higher than 612 kilometers per second because it's traveling a little bit along our line of sight.
The pulsar is 200 million times more energetic than the Earth. The supernova explosion appears to have given it a powerful kick.
The team's research was accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and can be found on arXiv.
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