The article was originally published at The Conversation.
Idan Ginsburg is an Academic Faculty at Georgia State University.
I see him as a shooting star.
So says the Earl of Salisbury as he ruminates about the future.
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During the English Renaissance, people believed shooting stars were falling from the heavens. The truth was far more mundane by the end of the 19th century. Falling stars are small pieces of rock or dust that quickly burn up upon entering Earth's atmosphere.
Nature has a surprise for you, shooting stars really do exist.
I am an astronomer who studies how objects move.
A new class of stars were confirmed by the observing program and telescopes at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory.
Hypervelocity stars are shooting stars that zoom through the universe at millions of miles per hour.
Jack Gilbert Hills, a theoretician at Los Alamos National Labs, came up with the idea of two stars that are bound to each other in 1988.
Imagine two ice skaters holding hands and spinning around until they let go. Two skaters are going to fly away from each other. When two stars are torn apart by a black hole, they will fly apart. One star might gain enough energy to slingshot itself out of the universe.
This is how hypervelocity stars are born.
After the publication of Hills, the astronomy community was interested in the possibility of hypervelocity stars. That changed in 2005.
A team of researchers using the MMT Observatory in Arizona came across something most unexpected while observing stars in the halo. The star was speeding at nearly 2 million mph. HVS1 was the first hypervelocity star.
Observations tell part of the story, but to help answer other questions, such as what happens to the companion after it separates from the hypervelocity star, my adviser and I turned to computer simulations. Our models show that the other star in the former pair is left in the same position as the Earth in the sun.
The discovery that two stars can crash into each other was an exciting result from these modeling efforts. The stars may coalesce into one massive star when this happens.
If you were wondering what might happen to a planet in the sky, we modeled that too. The black hole in the center of our galaxy can blast planets out of the Milky Way at 5% the speed of light.
No hypervelocity planets have been found as of today, but they might be out there waiting for some happy astronomer to chance upon them.
Some of the stars that the astronomy community had previously considered to be hypervelocity are likely bound to the Milky Way.
This result reveals two important points. There are different ways to accelerate stars. Astronomers know of thousands of stars. A hypervelocity star is not necessarily unbound from the Milky Way just because it is moving fast. Hypervelocity stars that are leaving the Milky Way may be less common than previously thought.
I like the fact that shooting stars exist. It is amazing that studying their trajectory and velocities can help answer some of the most important questions in science today.
Hypervelocity stars could offer clues to the nature and distribution of dark matter in the universe. It is possible that there is more than one black hole at the center of the galaxy.
My students are using NASA to search for planets around fast stars. The discovery of a single planet around a hypervelocity star will forever change planetary formation and survivability.
These stars are very fast, but they are slowly revealing the secrets of nature. You can make a wish if you can't see a real shooting star.
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