Thankfully the astronomer who spotted this wayward star didn't "shake it like a poloroid." ;)
Posted on 02/08/2005 10:16:16 PM PST by anymouse
An outcast star is zooming out of the Milky Way, the first ever seen escaping the galaxy, astronomers reported on Tuesday.
The star is heading for the emptiness of intergalactic space after being ejected from the heart of the Milky Way following a close encounter with a black hole, said Warren Brown, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The outcast is going so fast -- over 1.5 million mph -- that astronomers believe it was lobbed out of the galaxy by the tremendous force of a black hole thought to sit at the Milky Way's center. That speed is about twice the velocity needed to escape the galaxy's grip, Brown said by telephone.
"We have never before seen a star moving fast enough to completely escape the confines of our galaxy," he said. "We're tempted to call it the outcast star because it was forcefully tossed from its home."
The star used to be part of a binary pair, waltzing with its companion star close to the rim of the black hole. In this case, "close" is a relative term; the actual distance was probably about 50 times the 93 million-mile distance between Earth and the sun.
As the two stars twirled around each other, they were pulled faster and faster toward the edge of the black hole, one of those monster drains in space whose gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape once it is consumed.
While the companion star was captured by the black hole, the outcast continued on its whirling path around its edge.
Objects go faster the closer they get to black holes and this star was probably moving at extraordinary speed, perhaps as high as 20 million mph. That very speed, coupled with the speed of its twirling, sent the outcast zooming toward the edge of the Milky Way and beyond.
At this point, the outcast is about 180,000 light-years from Earth, in an outer region of the galaxy known as the halo. A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.
More information and images are available at http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/pr0505image.html
Thankfully the astronomer who spotted this wayward star didn't "shake it like a poloroid." ;)
Space/astronomy ping
So you can't help but wonder what would happen should the Earth get swallowed by a black hole. Kinda puts all of humanity's problems in an eerie perspective, doesn't it?
Holy cats!! Isn't that well past the speed of light (186,000 mph)? So what happened to all the nay-sayers who have said that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light? Pass the crow, gentlemen ....
Make that per second.
The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.
That would be 186,000 miles per second, not hour, for the speed of light.
I'm slow ... goin to bed now ... at 186,000 microns per hour.
Speed of light is 670,600,000 mph
But 1.5 millon miles per hour is still 416 miles per second.
I wouldn't want to be near this thing if it came back. It may go into some orbit!
There's no point in doomsday type blackhole scenarios, considering you and your greatX2,500 grandchildren wouldn't live long enough.
Oops! Well, math was never my strong point. (Hm, how could you tell ...? LOL!) Thanks for the corrections, all.
But that's still darned fast.
As said before, it's 186,000 miles per second - that translates to 669,600,000mph. That star is only moving at 0.224% of the speed of light.
Its hard to say how extreme gravitation and time lensing would affect a biological system.
However - the star was not swallowed up, so its unlikely it would "kill anything in the system" - however passing so close to it would certainly distort and alter orbits.
Mass, proximity, angle, speed, mass of orbiting bodies, speeds, equatorial planes of orbit, etc etc. If we had EVERY factor (unlikely) we could simply plug in the numbers and get a result.
>That would be 186,000 miles per second, not hour, for the
>speed of light.
For those of you who like myself be ignorant, that's 670,615,200 miles per hour, well faster than the piddling 1.5 million miles per hour this star is going.
Just looked it up here:
http://www.convertit.com/Go/ConvertIt/Measurement/Converter.ASP
1.5 million/miles/hr =416 miles/sec which is
.00223675 of the speed of light
Actually, to be ultra accurate, 670,614,120
=]
Well, one of the stars in a binary system *was* swallowed, at least by my reading of the article.
Even if potential planets were close enough to the remaining star to stay in its orbit, and not have their orbits radically altered - I was more interested/worried in the resulting radiation from the swallowed star's demise.
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