Hubble Catches Heavyweight Runaway Star Speeding from 30 Doradus
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 - 08:55
in Astronomy & Space
A heavy runaway star is rushing away from a nearby stellar nursery at more than 250,000 miles an hour, a speed that will get you to the Moon and back in two hours. The runaway is the most extreme case of a very massive star that has been kicked out of its home by a group of even heftier siblings. Tantalizing clues from three observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope's newly installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and some old-fashioned detective work, suggest that the star may have traveled about 375 light-years from its suspected home, a giant star cluster called R136.