Posted on 05/03/2014 9:30:01 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Astronomers say they have discovered a star cluster that has been thrown in the direction of Earth at a speed of more than two million miles per hour.
The cluster, named HVGC-1, originated in the M87 galaxy and is expected to endlessly drift through space, rocketing through the voids between other galaxies.
"Astronomers have found runaway stars before, but this is the first time we've found a runaway star cluster," said Nelson Caldwell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who is the lead author on a study which is set to be published in the The Astrophysical Journal.
HVGC stands for hypervelocity globular cluster. These clusters are groupings of thousands of stars contained inside a ball a few dozen light-years across.
The team found HVGC-1 using the MMT Telescope in Arizona after spending years studying the space around M87. A computer then calculated the speed of the cluster.
"We didn't expect to find anything moving that fast," said Jay Strader of Michigan State University, who is a co-author of the study.
The Milky Way Galaxy holds around 150 globular clusters, while the M87 galaxy holds thousands, according to a news release from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Astronomers believe HVGC-1 could have reached its current speed after passing through two supermassive black holes at the center of M87, which acted like a slingshot, flinging the cluster away.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
nice. maybe NASA could send Obama and Biden to go tell them that its not nice in the 21st century for big space objects to go flying off at Utopia (Rock Three, Terra, Earth).
that we will maybe apply sanctions like freeze some bank accounts of some of the ETs’
The speed of light is roughly 166,282 miles per second.
Light travels 111,769,920 miles per minute.
Light travels 670,615,200 miles per hour.
So given the speed of light is 100s of times faster than 2 million miles per hour a star cluster reaching that speed is entirely possible.
Probably a racist.
Yep, slower than a slow boat to China in the big scheme of things. But they make it sound like it’s going to crash into us tomorrow. Makes for exciting headlines, but it’s too bad when the unexaggerated truth is interesting enough.
Hence the “WTF” remark
article is per hour, normally we say 186,000 per second?
Remember when grade school teachers spend a lot of time teaching us to correctly label numbers?
That is why I wasn’t counting zeros-that 186,000 MPS is what automatically came to mind, and I had a dumbass attack...
Flying Star Clusters are all the rage these days, along with Blood Moons and such, so we need to give them all the help we can to get here.
Well, we may know how fast and which direction it was headed when the light was produced, but how long did it take for the light (showing the cluster and it’s vector) to get here? Whatever we watch at a distance has already happened, it takes time for the view to arrive.
2m miles an hour is about 3 m feet per second or around 555 miles per second. SOL is about 186,000 miles per second. or about 670 million miles per hour.
Gee, really?
2 Million mph.
The speed of light is 670 616 629 miles per hour.
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