• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Scrawny Star With Large Planet Breaks Galactic Speed Record At 1.9 Million Kilometers Per Hour

February 11, 2025 by Deborah Bloomfield

Around the galaxy exist stars that have been given a push, and orbit much faster than the vast majority of their stellar companions. These are known as hypervelocity stars, with some moving faster than the escape velocity of the Milky Way of around 600 kilometers (373 miles) per second. There is another star that is almost as speedy, but it doesn’t have to worry about that record because it might have broken another. It looks like it has a planet, making this the fastest star system known.

ADVERTISEMENT GO AD FREE

The system was spotted in archival data from MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) which revealed the likely presence of this small star, one-fifth of our Sun, and a large planet, 29 times the mass of Earth.

“We think this is a so-called super-Neptune world orbiting a low-mass star at a distance that would lie between the orbits of Venus and Earth if it were in our Solar System,” lead author Dr Sean Terry, from the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. “If so, it will be the first planet ever found orbiting a hypervelocity star.”

The original observations were from 2011, and were possible because this pair of objects passed in front of a more distant star, slightly magnifying it like a glass lens. This is the microlensing effect – a very cool way to discover exoplanets but with a drawback. They couldn’t measure their exact masses, only their ratio, because the distance of the pair is not known. One is about 2,300 times heavier than the other.

“Determining the mass ratio is easy,” said Dr David Bennett, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park and NASA Goddard, who co-authored the new paper and led the original study in 2011. “It’s much more difficult to calculate their actual masses.”

The team looked for an object that might match the stellar description. They found it in data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite dated to 2021. The candidate is this star and super-Neptune pair located 24,000 light-years away, within the Milky Way’s galactic bulge.

The system could be as small as a Jupiter-sized planet with a moon the size of ours, although that would be invisible to Gaia. Follow-up data from Gaia, which ceased operations a few weeks ago, will be needed to confirm this is the case. The motion of the star was only measured in 2D on the projected sky, so the more recent observations will allow for more accurate measurements.

ADVERTISEMENT GO AD FREE

“To be certain the newly identified star is part of the system that caused the 2011 signal, we’d like to look again in another year and see if it moves the right amount and in the right direction to confirm it came from the point where we detected the signal,” Bennett said.

“If high-resolution observations show that the star just stays in the same position, then we can tell for sure that it is not part of the system that caused the signal,” said Aparna Bhattacharya, a research scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park and NASA Goddard who co-authored the new paper. “That would mean the rogue planet and exomoon model is favored.”

It might be that the star system is actually faster than 600 kilometers per second (1.3 million miles per hour). This would be the first known star system that eventually will leave the Milky Way.

The study is published in The Astronomical Journal.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Japan’s Kishida: Aim distribute COVID-19 drugs by year-end if elected PM
  2. Officials Warn Deadly Monkeypox Variant In DRC Could Soon Spread Worldwide
  3. Is Logic Flawed? Find Out More In Issue 13 Of CURIOUS – Out Now
  4. At Least 123 Members Of US Congress Are Climate Change Deniers

Source Link: Scrawny Star With Large Planet Breaks Galactic Speed Record At 1.9 Million Kilometers Per Hour

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • What Alternatives Are There To The Big Bang Model?
  • Magnetic Flip Seen Around First Photographed Black Hole Pushes “Models To The Limit”
  • Something Out Of Nothing: New Approach Mimics Matter Creation Using Superfluid Helium
  • Surströmming: Why Sweden’s Stinky Fermented Fish Smells So Bad (But People Still Eat It)
  • First-Ever Recording Of Black Hole Recoil Captured During Merger – And You Can Listen To It
  • The Moon Is Moving Away From Earth At A Rate Of About 3.8 Centimeters Per Year. Will It Ever Drift Apart?
  • As Solar Storm Hits Earth NASA Finds “The Sun Is Slowly Waking Up”
  • Plate Tectonics And CO2 On Planets Suggest Alien Civilizations “Are Probably Pretty Rare”
  • How To Watch The “Awkward” Partial Solar Eclipse This Weekend
  • World’s Oldest Pots: 20,000-Year-Old Vessels May Have Been Used For Cooking Clams Or Brewing Beer
  • “The Body Is Slowly And Continuously Heated”: 14,000-Year-Old Smoked Mummies Are World’s Oldest
  • Pizza Slices, Polaroid Pictures, And Over 300 Hats: What’s Left Behind In Yellowstone’s Hydrothermal Areas?
  • The Mathematical Paradox That Lets You Create Something From Nothing
  • Ancient Asteroid Ripped Apart In Collision Had Flowing Water
  • Flying Foxes Include The World’s Biggest Bat And The Largest Mammal Capable Of True Flight
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version