AsianScientist (May 12, 2014) – A team of scientists from China and the US has discovered a hypervelocity star that appears to be the nearest to Earth, potentially revealing insights into the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way and allowing scientists to better understand the nature of its surrounding dark matter.
Hypervelocity stars are massive stars whose unusually high velocities are thought to be attributed to their ejection from massive black holes found in galaxies. About 20 such stars have been found by astronomers in the past decade.
The discovery, which has been published in The Astrophysical Journal: Letters, was made while the team conducted research into stars with the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) located at the Xinglong Observing Station of the National Astronomical Observatories of China.
According to the research, the new hypervelocity star – named LAMOST-HVS1 – travels at about 1.1 million mph relative to the speed of the center of the Milky Way. It is situated about 249 quadrillion (249 × 1015) miles from Earth, thereby making it Earth’s closest hypervelocity star. According to lead author Dr. Zheng Zheng, Assistant Professor at The University of Utah, it is also the “second-brightest, and one of the three most massive hypervelocity stars discovered so far.”
“The hypervelocity star tells us a lot about our galaxy – especially its center and the dark matter halo,” says Dr. Zheng.
The article can be found at: Zheng et al. (2014) The First Hypervelocity Star From The LAMOST Survey.
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Source: University of Utah.
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