Hubble catches heavyweight runaway star speeding from 30 Doradus
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 - 09:22
in Astronomy & Space
A heavy runaway star rushing away from a nearby stellar nursery at more than 400,000 kilometres per hour, a speed that would 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 NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s newly installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), 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.