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Bizarre Cosmic Objects Universe
Speedy stars fly acrossUniverse
Some stars may travel across the cosmos, perhaps with
aliens in tow
By Marcus Woo7 September 2015
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The stillness of the night sky is deceiving. Because of the sheer vastness
of space, stars appear unmoving like celestial fixtures. In actuality,
though, they're zipping through the cosmos - some at ridiculously high
speeds: thousands, and even tens of thousands of kilometres per
second.
That's roughly 100,000 times faster than the speediest trainand 1,000
times faster than the fastest spacecraft that's ever flown. That's fast
enough for a few spins around Earth in the time it takes to put on your
socks. The point is, that's fast.
"These individual stars basically travel from one
side of the universe to the other
Some astrophysicists have suggested that, in principle, stars could go
Stars moving across the Nambian sky (Credit: Steve Bloom Images/Alamy)
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even faster - even as fast as light. Such stars may even harbour planets,
prompting speculation that they could serve as intergalactic transport for
alien life.
But you don't need to speculate to find stars rocketing out of our own
Milky Way Galaxy. A speed of a thousand or so kilometres per second is
already fast enough to send a star hurtling toward the lonesome
expanse. These hypervelocity stars, as they're called, were only
discovered about 10 years ago. So far, astronomers have found a total of
about two dozen leaving the Milky Way. And they're trying to find more.
Despite their name, however, hypervelocity stars aren't the fastest known
stars. That title belongs to the handful of stars whirling around the
supermassive black hole at the galactic centre. One of the fastest
reaches 12,000 km/s. But these stars are so close to the behemoth,which weighs as much as four million suns, that such speeds aren't
enough to escape its gravitational grip. These stars, however, may have
Can aliens hitchhike alongside shooting stars? (Credit: Royal ObservatoryEdinburgh/SPL)
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played an integral role in kicking hypervelocity stars out of the galaxy.
In 1988, astrophysicist Jack Hills of Los Alamos National Laboratory in
the US described a hypothetical encounterbetween a supermassive
black hole and a binary star system, which consists of two stars orbiting
each other.
"These stars would be one way for alien life to
spread from galaxy to galaxy. No fancyspaceships needed
He realised that if the binary got too close, the gravitational dance with
the black hole would fling one of the stars out at thousands of kilometres
per second. He dubbed these exiled stars hypervelocity stars.
Meanwhile, the black hole pulls the other star into a tight orbit.
But for years, no one paid much attention to this idea. After all, no one
had ever seen a star escaping the galaxy.
Then, in 2005, an astronomer named Warren Brown was searching for a
certain type of bright, blue star in the Milky Way. By tracking their
motions, and thus the galaxy's gravitational influence on them, he was
trying to measure the mass of the galaxy. But what he found instead was
a star moving really fast. Too fast. It was leaving the galaxy at 853
km/s - more than 3 million km/h. "The speed was unlike anything I'd ever
seen before," says Brown, who's at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics in the US.
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Then he came across Hills's paper, which seemed to explain the
discovery perfectly. "If you have a supermassive black hole at the very
centre of the galaxy, every so often it should slingshot a star out of the
galaxy," Brown says. This mechanism would also leave a lot of stars in
tight orbits around the central black hole, which is exactly what
astronomers observe.
Buoyed by this discovery, Brown and other astronomers set out to find
more fast stars. Today, they've found about two dozen of them - anumber that's about right considering how often the galaxy's black hole
should be tossing out stars. "The numbers add up," Brown says. "It's
pretty likely that even though they're now hundreds of thousands of light
years away from the Milky Way proper, these stars were indeed formed
right in the heart of the Milky Way."
Some stars move through the Universe (Credit: NASA/ESA/STSCI/A.Schaller/SPL)
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But Brown wants to find more. The ones he detected were big, blue, and
bright - a hundred times more luminous than the sun - simply because
those were the ones that stand out amidst the hundreds of billions of
stars in the galaxy. According to estimates, Brown says, about a
thousand hypervelocity stars might be in the galaxy's vicinity, and
chances are that many of them are smaller and dimmer, making them
hard to find.
To know for sure if a star is escaping the galaxy, astronomers need topinpoint its speed. As a star moves away, its light turns redder, stretching
to longer wavelengths. So by measuring how much a star's spectrum - its
light broken up into its constituent wavelengths - is shifted toward redder
colours, astronomers can determine its speed.
Zeta Ophiuchi, a runaway star moving through space (Credit:NASA/JPL/Caltech/UCLA)
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The stars can also help astronomers map out all the mass in the galaxy.
"Any deviation of their trajectory betrays the influence of the underlying
mass pulling on them," Brown explains. Most of the galaxy's mass is
composed of the mysterious, invisible stuff known as dark matter. To
figure out what it is, astronomers want to know exactly how much there is
and how it's distributed across the galaxy.
The weird one
While most hypervelocity stars seem to have come from the galactic
centre, that's not necessarily the case for all of them. In fact, the fastest
known hypervelocity star - an object dubbed US 708 hurtling outward at
1,200 km/s (more than four million km/h) - has a completely different
origin. "This thing," Brown says, "is weird."
When a team of astronomers discovered the star in 2005, they clocked it
at 750 km/s. It wasn't until this year that a team led by Stephan Geier of
the European Southern Observatory in Germany realised that the star
Black holes can attract stars (Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss)
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was going much faster than that.
Comparing new observations from the Pan-STARRS survey with archival
images dating back to the 1950s, the astronomers did what Gaia is now
doing for other stars: determine the star's motion across the sky. They
revealed not only its faster speed, but also its trajectory. And apparently,
US 708 did not come from the galactic centre, ruling out a black hole
origin.
While no one's sure yet, astronomers think it was a huge explosion that
launched the star. The first clue is the fact that US 708 is a rare type of
star called a hot subdwarf.
In the past, however, it was once a normal star. According to the
hypothesis, it was part of a binary system with a white dwarf - a hot,dense object that's the remnant of a star such as the sun. The two were
in a tight orbit, and during its normal aging process, US 708 expanded
Two stars can orbit each other, spinning fast like skaters (Credit: ChrisButler/SPL)
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into a red giant and engulfed the white dwarf. Meanwhile, the white dwarf
continued orbiting, and as it did so, it plowed away US 708's outer layers.
With only its hot, helium-burning core remaining, US 708 became a
subdwarf.
Then, the two objects spiraled toward each other, losing energy by
emitting gravitational waves, ripples in the space-time fabric of the
universe. Eventually, they got so close that the subdwarf started spilling
helium over onto the white dwarf. So much helium accumulated that it
ignited nuclear fusion, causing the core to explode and destroy the white
dwarf.
"Nuclear fusion of helium is much more violent than nuclear fusion of
hydrogen in our sun," Geier explains. "This does not go slowly. This
happens in a flash."
Before the blast, though, the two stars had been orbiting each other
extremely fast - about once every 10 minutes, according to calculations.
A single star can then be flung deeper into space (Credit: CVI Textures/Alamy)
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times as massive as the sun - together with a star, their interactions
could kick that star out at a speed ten times greater than any of the
hypervelocity stars known.
These high-speed rendezvous can happen relatively often in the
universe. Almost every galaxy, such as the Milky Way, has a
supermassive black hole at its centre. And galaxies tend to gravitate
toward one another, making collisions somewhat commonplace. When
they do, the two central black holes spiral in toward each other andeventually merge. Stars that get in the way either fall into the black holes,
are tossed aside but remain in the galaxy, or are completely ejected.
Most of those ejected stars will be about as fast as the conventional
hypervelocity stars. But about one percent of them could surpass 10,000
km/s, reaching up to 100,000 km/s, or one-third the speed of light."Beyond 10,000 km/s - this is really the only game in town," Guillochon
says. "There's really no other way to accelerate stars up to that speed."
Do some stars wander the Universe at super speed? (Credit: JG
Photography/Alamy)
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While the observable universe could have a trillion of these speedsters
zooming around at 10 percent the speed of light, only a few thousand
would reach the Milky Way's neighborhood. That may sound like a lot,
but they would account for only one out of every hundred million stars in
the galaxy. They wouldn't be easy to find.
But it's possible, Guillochon says. The next generation of telescopes,
such as the James Webb Space Telescopeor the Large Synoptic
Survey Telescopenow being built in Chile, could detect one of these
stars. While the normal hypervelocity stars are moving too slowly to get
very far, these super speedsters can cover lots of ground. "These
individual stars basically travel from one side of the universe to the
other," Guillochon says.
And that makes them useful for science. By combining the ages of the
stars with their speeds, astronomers could estimate the distance the
stars have traveled, providing a new way to measure cosmic distances.
A black hole is at the centre of the Milky Way (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
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These superfast stars would also act as beacons that herald the merging
of two supermassive black holes. Astronomers can then follow up with
ESA's eLISAsatellite, slated for launch in 2028, which will detect the
gravitational waves produced from these violent collisions.
A tiny fraction of the stars could conceivably be even faster. If a
supermassive black hole were spinning rapidly, and a star were orbiting
in the same direction as the spin, an incoming secondary black hole
could expel the star to speeds approaching that of light. But, Guillochon
says, that would require such a rare configuration that even in a universe
of possibilities, it would be practically impossible to detect such a star.
Still, even sub-light-speed stars would be the ultimate spacefarers, fast
enough to have crossed large swaths of intergalactic space. A planet
could orbit one of these stars, and if the orbit were tight enough -
comparable to the distance between Earth and the sun - the planet
would survive the expulsion from its galaxy.
The Indian Night Sky (credit: Navaneeth Unnikrishnan).
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But given the harsh environment around a black hole, it would be difficult
for life to evolve, Guillochon says. If it could, however, these stars would
be one way for alien life to spread from galaxy to galaxy. No fancy
spaceships needed.
Of course, that scenario is more science fiction than anything. But it's
something to think about the next time you look up at those stars,
sparkling and seemingly still.
Pulsars spin so fast they are capable of warping atoms
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22/27
The air is unbreathable but life still thrives
Extreme Life
Bizarre beasts of the poison cave
Cave
Earth Capture
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23/27
The internet is arguing over which are the cutest. Should these win?
We're obese, smell, don't hang with penguins and have a thing for brown bears
The worlds cutest animals
The Truth About Animals
The truth about polar bears
Polar bear
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24/27
This is what the New Horizons probe saw as it whizzed past
Video
Astonishing flyby of Pluto
Pluto
Around the BBC
Future
The lost tunnels of Liverpool
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25/27
Future
Is alcohol actually bad for you?
Culture
The mystery of punctuations origin
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26/27
Culture
They policed the police
Capital
The best beach city for expats?
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27/27
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Why strategy beers are important
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