Speed Merchant! A Tiny Star That May Reach “Escape Velocity”…

Discovered by citizen astronomers who are pouring over petabytes of raw data, an ancient brown dwarf -- super cooled -- is moving 1.3 million mph, on a trajectory to escape our galaxy. The speedster is about 450 light years away from us -- now on the other side of our Milky Way.

The leading hypothesis is that it was "sling-shotted" by either a binary pair of black holes in a globular cluster, or by a paired star -- one that went supernova billions of years ago, giving it a violent shove. Here's the story:

. . .Thanks to the efforts of a citizen science project called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 and a team of astronomers from around the country, a rare hypervelocity L subdwarf star has been found racing through the Milky Way. More remarkably, this star may be on a trajectory that causes it to leave the Milky Way altogether. The research, led by University of California San Diego Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Adam Burgasser, was presented last month at a press conference during the 244th national meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Madison, Wisconsin. . . .

It may seem like the Sun is stationary while the planets in its orbit are moving, but the Sun is actually orbiting around the Milky Way galaxy at an impressive rate of about 220 kilometers per second — almost half a million miles per hour. As fast as that may seem, when a faint red star was discovered crossing the sky at a noticeably quick pace, scientists took notice. . . .

Yep -- now you know. . . I'll forever be fascinated by the fleet of foot among us. Smiling, now, in the luminously clearer dawn.

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