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Bonanos and López-Morales Determine Origin of Alien Star |
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Monday, 28 January 2008 |
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Vera C. Rubin Fellow Alceste Bonanos and Hubble Fellow Mercedes López-Morales and collaborators have discovered the origin of a young star speeding away from the Milky Way. On the basis of its age and distance traveled, it could not have come from our galaxy. Rather, the group determined that the star came from our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a result suggesting that the star was ejected from a yet-to-be-observed massive black hole. The research will be published in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The star, HE 0437-5439, is a young early type star, and one of ten so-called hypervelocity stars found so far, speeding through our galaxy. “But this one is different from the other nine,” López-Morales commented. “Their type, speed, and age make them consistent with having been ejected from the center of our galaxy, where we know there is a super-massive black hole. This star, discovered in 2005, initially appeared to have an elemental makeup like our Sun’s, suggesting that it, too, came from the center of our galaxy. But that didn’t make sense because it would have taken 100 million years to get to its current location, and HE 0437-5439 is only 35 million years old.”
For more information, see the CIW Press Release or Space.com article.
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