2. Stars Shooting
Found Year: 2005
Sloan Digital Survey found it.
Location: Not specified
From wishing upon them to witnessing their brilliance bathe the night sky, “shooting stars” have had a profound effect on people’s lives for millennia. Nevertheless, the first proof of a REAL shooting star wasn’t discovered until 2005.
Ascending Stars ©Flickr/Mike Renlund
Hypervelocity stars—stars that speed across space at hundreds of thousands of miles per second—were found by astronomers at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory during the implementation of the Sloan Digital Survey. How do they accelerate to such levels? In other words, when a supermassive black hole swallows one of the two stars in a binary star system, the second star is flung in the other direction like a bat out of hell.
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