Star Flung From Milky Way at High Speed

fenimor writes "Using the MMT Observatory in Tucson, astronomers have discovered a star three times bigger than the sun, leaving our galaxy at a speed of over 1.5 million miles per hour (670 kilometers per second). The first-of-its-kind finding not only confirms an earlier theory about the existence of such speeding stars, but also reinforces the notion that the Milky Way spins around a black hole."

That's Life

[Doc Ruby]

It's a glider [radicaleye.com]!

Re:That's Life

[Loadmaster]

It's a big ball of garbage from Old New York. I checked it with my smell-o-scope.

Outcast Star

[lecithin]

"We're tempted to call it the outcast star because it was forcefully tossed from its home."

Instead they are going to call it a galaxy challenged star.

Re:Outcast Star

[lucabrasi999]

Instead they are going to call it a galaxy challenged star.

The Mayor Star of the Milky Way decided to form a committee to review the causes of "Outcast Star Syndrome". That committee, which will be composed of various leaders in the Star Community, along with interested Asteroids, Planets and Comets, will interview other Stars that have, through no fault of their own, also been cast out of the galaxy.

In six months, the Committee will issue a report that includes recommendations on how we can prevent Outcast Star Syndrome along with a 12 step program to re-integrate former Outcast Starts into the entire Milky Way community, with the hopes that they will become productive members of the community again.

Re:Outcast Star

[iamacat]

I miss Hitchhikers guide to galaxy. I am sure Douglas Adams would have an excellent explanation on exactly why the miserable species in that star system were expelled and what kind of comments they are hearing on the radio as they are zooming away.

Although maybe they are just trying to start a restaurant at the end of the universe.

a giant ball of flame at a million miles an hour

[essreenim]

galactic pin ball here we come!!

Yep.

[inertia187]

Just like my screen saver predicted.

Fling out of the galaxy

[falser]

Ok, now how do we apply this knowledge to do the same to Microsoft/Paris Hilton/Terrel Owens/Celine Dion.... ?

Re:Fling out of the galaxy

[Rude Turnip]

Between Microsoft and Paris Hilton alone, there is so much suction I'm surprised the rest of us haven't been flung into space.

Re:Fling out of the galaxy

[witte]

Well, you throw 'em into near-orbit around a black hole, so they get slingshot out of the galaxy.

In your example, succes or failure of this method would be irrelevant, though... Any outcome would be acceptable :)

Wish Upon A Star...

[FIGJAM]

Starlight, star bright, first-of-its-kind star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, get laid tonight.

Speed is relative

[Hoi Polloi]

What are they measuring the star's speed against? The center of our galaxy? The earth?

Re:Speed is relative

[grahamsz]

Presumably if it's leaving our galaxy then that'd be the normal way to look at it.

Alternatively maybe it's staying still and we are being flung away from it at 1.5M mph.

Re:Speed is relative

[jridley]

It's moving like hell compared to any large body in the galaxy, or the average.

I remember this story:
Professor: The temperature in this kind of reaction is about 3 million degrees.
Student: Is that Celcius or Kelvin?
Professor: It doesn't matter!

IOW, the difference between C and K at ~3m* is insignificant. In the same way, the speed of this star is practically the same from any point of reference near any star in the galaxy.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Relative speeds

[FirienFirien]

A bit of googling pulled up:

Meteorites: 10ish miles per second, depending (yukon = 9.3)
Earth through space: 18.5 miles per second
Sun through space: around 155 miles per second

This thing is moving really quite scarily fast. The energy in that thing must be huge, since it's already 3 times the size of the sun.

Questions: what would the effects of the speed be? Would the galaxial dust clouds be dense enough to 'fan the flames'? How does something that gets accelerated to that speed stay together - or, how big was it before it shed all the mass that couldn't stay together!

There was a monty python song about this... *hums*

Re:Relative speeds

[Spackler]

You seem to be using "through space" as a non-relative term. If the sun is moving "through space" at 155 miles a second, how can earth be moving "through space" at only 18 miles a second. It that was the case we would be 16,000 miles farther from the sun since I started writing this email. 3 million miles more than when I woke up this morning and 180,795,888,000 miles since I was born.

Re:Relative speeds

[khallow]

It's had plenty of time to settle down. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find that it still had most of its mass. After all, the star is densest in its interior. Most of the mass probably is concentrated there. The near pass might have shed a portion of the near surface layers (due to tidal forces), but those would probably have been strewn all over the place and little would travel along the trajectory of the star.

As far as acceleration goes, tidal forces are what would potentially tear a star up. Tho

Re:Relative speeds

[nizo]

Is it possible for a star flung like this to keep any planets it had, or would they most likely get sucked off by the black hole?

Re:Relative speeds

[khallow]

Third, a slingshot-type approach such as the one we are contemplating will impart significant angular momentum (spin) to the star. Again, since we're dealing with such a gentle gradient, the star won't spin apart, but the spin will adversely affect the planet's rotation as tidal locking slowly takes effect. (Not sure just how much of an effect this would be, though...I'll leave more mathmetically adept readers to do the math.)

Actually, this isn't the scenario described in the article. The theory concerns

Re:Relative speeds

[Viking Coder]

Come on! You gotta do the whole thing!

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

To put that in perspective...

[GillBates0]

That's 0.002 [google.com] times the speed of light or only about 1/500th the speed of light.

Plugging 670*10^3m/s into Lorent'z equation:

t = t'/(sqrt(1-(v^2/c2))
where v=6.7*10^5m/s
and c = 2.99*10^8,

I got a time dilation of factor of 1.00000249. That is, time in the moving system (the star) will be observed by a stationary observer to be running slower by a factor of 1.00000249.

Not as impressive as I hoped it would be when I started the calculations.

Re:To put that in perspective...

[catdevnull]

I genuflect in the general direction of your geekitude....

Re:To put that in perspective...

[Tony Hoyle]

Except the star presumably has a huge amount of gravitational force, observation the surface of the star will be affected by that.

So you're probably right about the position, but it's a debatable point about the star itself.

Re:To put that in perspective...

[Alsee]

The time dilation may not be impressive, but the raw energy involved certainly is. Energy(non-relativistic)=1/2mv^2. The star is three times the mass of our sun, times v^2, times 1/2, equals 4.5*10^41 kg-m^2/s^2. That is 4.5*10^41 joules. Our entire sun produces a measly 3.9^10^26 joules per second.

It would take the entire energy output of our sun for about 36.5 million years (at a magical 100% efficiency) to accellerate that star to that speed.

-

Re:To put that in perspective...

[StarsAreAlsoFire]

Mass Sol = 1.99E30_kg

Mass Star = 5.97E30_kg

And the relativistic mass of the star:

M' = m/(sqrt(1-(v/c)^2))
= m/(sqrt(1 - (670*10^3/c)^2))
= m/(sqrt(1 - .000005)
= m/.999998
= 5.9700149*10^30

So an extra 1.5E26kg -- about 25 Earths (Earth mass = 5.979E24 kg)

FUN!!!

Hindmost

[Rorschach1]

Goddamned Puppeteers. Before you know it, they'll be fleeing with all the good stars.

Re:Hindmost

[lucabrasi999]

That is really, really funny.

Explanation

[af_robot]

For those, who didnit get it.
Puppeteers are alien race from novel "Ringworld" by Larry Nivel. They were moving their home star system to a new galaxy to escape from the Core explosion.

Re:Hindmost

[chiph]

FYI: the 5-planet Klemperer Rosette used as a plot device by Larry Niven for the Puppeteer's home worlds has been shown to be unstable:
http://burtleburtle.net/bob/physics/kempler.html

(warning, contains java applets which will probably freeze up Firefox)

Chip H.

Re:Hindmost

[EvilTwinSkippy]

I wonder how many we don't see leaving because they didn't cheap out, and built a Dysen Sphere instead?

Lever

[suso]

I guess someone finally found a really long plank and a place to stand.

Still...

[SharpFang]

...only 0.2% c

This proves it

[That's Unpossible!]

The speed of light is 1.5 million miles an hour!

Inertia & Momentum

[mreed911]

While this seems astounding, leaving some to wonder "how's a star stay together at 1.5MM mph?", it's important to remember that, for all intents and purposes, it's travelling through NOTHING, through a vacuum. As long as its velocity is stable (not running into things to slow it down), there's no inertia to change it's shape, etc.

Is there *really* a difference, physically, on an object moving at 1.5MM mph and one standing completely still, if they're not interacting with anything else? No. Their inertias are the same, so their physical properties and interactions are the same.

Momentum, however, could be a bitch. Imagine this star slamming into another star (or, a la the Death Star, a small planet in the Aldeberan system). Ka-pow, with the graphic like on the old Batman series! Would make Levy-Shoemaker look like a BB gun (you're gonna put your eye out!)...

Re:Inertia & Momentum

[forand]

You are missing the point. It is leaving the galaxy. Everything else we have seen in our Galaxy is gravitationally bound to it thus it cannot leave, this is amazing because it moving above the escape velocity of the galaxy.

Re:Inertia & Momentum - Star Stampede

[m0smithslash]

How do we know that the star is being ejected from the solar system? According to relativity, to an observer in the galaxy, a star being ejected from the galaxy looks the exactly the same as using the star as the frame of reference and the whole of the milky way galaxy is moving away from it. Since we didn't actually see where this star was coming from, the star could have been holding still for a long time while the galaxy far,far away came stampeding past like the wildebeast stampede in Lion King [amazon.com]. To u

Re:Inertia & Momentum - Star Stampede

[Wraithlyn]

Well they say its trajectory is coming pretty much directly from the centre of our galaxy, which supports their galactic black hole slingshot theory.

It's still possible that it's an extra-galactic object that just happened to intersect with the centre, but that requires us to assume a large coincidence, and we know what Occam has to say about that.

that's what you get...

[jpellino]

... for being the last one on the galactic ice-skating chain of kids^H^H^H^H stars.

Supermassive black holes

[Spy der Mann]

Recently I saw on Discovery that many galaxies (if not all) were orbiting around supermassive black holes [berkeley.edu]. And that the orbiting speed of the stars is proportional [arxiv.org] to the black holes' mass. This is known as the "M-sigma" relation.

This meant that the supermassive black holes actually contributed to the process of galaxy formation.

The theory is more or less the following:

In the center of a galaxy-sized gas cloud, a star collapsed, forming a black hole. The black hole began eating the gas around it, forming a quasar (quasars are the matter just about to be swallowed by a black hole, disintegrating and generating enormous amounts of energy).

The quasar, due to its high temperature and rotational speed, heated the surrounding gas cloud, activating a chain reaction that gave birth to all the stars in the new-forming galaxy.

Eventually, the quasar pushed away the stars, so the black hole could only be fed by the quasar itself. After that, the black hole enters a dormant phase (it has nothing else to eat), and the galaxy is already formed (of course, I'm talking about a process that takes billions of years).

Re:Supermassive black holes

[bigmaddog]

Call me a bitch about details, but... (I know, someone else will be a detail bitch about my details.)

Quasars radiate tremendous amounts of energy not because matter "disintergrates" as it falls inwards but merely because it falls inwards.

It's as if a bucket of bricks fell on your head from ten stories up (well, almost) - while up there, the bricks & bucket have potential gravitational energy. As the whole thing falls, gravitational potential energy is converted to kinetic energy, some of which is lost to friction with the surrounding air. It may generate sound, like a low whistle or thunderous roar, depending on the aerodynamic properties of the bucket. When the bucket hits, all the remaining kinetic energy is dissipated by your skull and brain, and "radiates away" as sounds and splattering gore. (This last part about the brain and plattering is not necessary for the analogy but I just like talking about gore.)

So, same thing with quasars, more or less. Stuff far away from the quasar has a lot of gravitational potential energy because quasars are so damn massive, which leads to powerful gravity. As it falls inwards, it trades this energy for kinetic enrgy, moving faster, and, as it grinds against other stuff in the accretion disk around the quasar, some of which is moving slower, some of this energy is lost to friction, except instead of sound (whistling) with the bucket & bricks, you get EM radiation. (If the bucket fell from really high up, it might heat up from friction and start emmiting some radiation of its own, in infra red and then in visible light.)

Sice the black holes at the centre of galaxies are so damn huge, and because falling into a black hole release several orders of magnitude more of the massenergy of a piece of matter than fission or fusion ever could (astronomy textbook not at hand, so can't quote the numbers), we get a whole lot of radiation this way, and so quasars are really really bright.

Re:Supermassive black holes

[mbrother]

Some of the energy is in the form of synchrotron, but this is more important in so-called radio-loud objects with jets, and is beamed along the jets. The vast majority of the radiation is thermal, either from the hot accretion disk or reprocessed radiotion from surround dust heated to a few hundred degrees kelvin. Quasars are my specialty.

Does anyone know...

[midifarm]

if this thing is accelerating, decelerating or at a constant speed?

Peace

Re:Does anyone know...

[Overzeetop]

Well, if we can simplify the motion to (1) the galactic core and (2) the star, Kepler's equations require that it be decelerating. Based on the fact that it has 2x the escape velocity of the galaxy, that would put it on a hyperbolic path with the galactic core at its focus (the real one). After an (infinite) period of time, it will slow to a spped which is 1.7x escape velocity (v-inf^2=v^2 - v-esc^2) based on the 2x number being the maximum velocity obtained. This is more commonly known as the "hyperbolic excess speed".

This post brought to you in part by Bates, Mueller, and White...the best textbook value in the world ($6 for an astrodynamics text...and a pretty good on at that).

Re:Does anyone know...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Theoretically, decellerating.

Observationally, we don't know. It required a lot of observations to gauge its proper speed. It is going to require a lot more to gauge how much that speed is changing.

One moment of insight I had into how much we don't know about our universe was fooling around with some software from NASA. (Perks of working in a science museum with a planetarium.) One of the items you could toggle on you flights around the solar system and surrounds and ... well just about anywhere in the o

/. a star?

[Me-The-Person]

Can a star be /.'d? If so, did we just change the orbit of 5 other planets?

Confirmation

[way2slo]

/usr/dt/bin/xlock -mode galaxy

There's your confirmation. At least on some Solaris servers I've seen.

The end is near!!

[Ogrez]

At last.. Jesus is taking his ball.. AND GOING HOME!!

repent!

Impressive?

[SharpFang]

20s across Earth
2 days for the distance between Sun and Earth
1800 years to move between Solar System and Proxima Centauri
43 million years to cross the Galaxy.

Man...

[Mindwarp]

...just thinking about the kinetic energy that thing must be carrying with it makes my head spin.

All we need now is a super-massive baseball mitt on the end of a hyper-massive wooden pole hooked up to a mega-massive generator spindle.

Re:Man...

[Mindwarp]

Mass of the star: approx 6x10^30 kg Velocity: 670,000 m/s Kinetic energy = 0.5 x m x v^2 Energy is very approximately 1.3x10^42 Joules, which I believe is enough to heat a Googleplex of Libraries of Congress for 3.141 Millenia.

An Interesting Star

[Nom du Keyboard]

This incredible speed likely resulted from a close encounter with the Milky Way's central black hole, which flung the star outward like a stone from a slingshot.

Close enough to accelerate it that much, yet not disrupt it in the process through tidal effects? An interesting star, to say the least. Too bad we can't observe it more closely.

milky way munching stars and galaxies

[peter303]

I thought last year they found four "drawf" galaxies in vicinity of the Milky Way, about to be absorbed.

The big Kahuna of course will be the merger with Andromeda about two billion years hence. Our mutual gravitational attraction is drawing us together. In practical terms, both galaxies are essentially empty space. However Andromeda will grow from its present size in the sky of six full moons (192 arc minutes; but just a faint smudge) to fill the entire sky. See the collision simulation here. [utoronto.ca]

Re:milky way munching stars and galaxies

[corngrower]

there probably would be no kinetic interaction between the two if they were to "collide".

I would bet that there would be a number of stars in the galaxies that would have their motions markedly changed. You'ld probably have a number of stars being scattered around and exiting the galaxies at high velocities relative to other stars . There may even be an actual collision or two.

Weapon Testing, Anyone?

[Trifthen]

Who wants to be the first to claim this is simply a huge plasma burst fired by an even larger weapon? Maybe it's just some alien race out there who wants to illustrate that they too, emjoy blowing things up with oversized guns. ^_^

Let me be the first to say...

[fizban]

"Fore!"

More info

[Woogiemonger]

I found more info on this, including more numbers, from this Reuters article [yahoo.com]. And by the way, it's moving at about 0.002c, which is pretty fast for something so huge. However, if you really want to be impressed, the gas in blazar jets [usatoday.com] moves at about 0.999c.

Black hole?

[The One and Only]

I thought it was well established that at the center of the galaxy there is a planet, that God is on that planet, and that (as it is becoming abundantly clear), he needs a fucking starship!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:What about relativity?

[pclminion]

Motion is relative but acceleration is not. Although it is valid to choose the star as the frame of reference, it is a non-inertial frame and thus would require the introduction of fictitious forces to explain the behavior of the rest of the universe.

If I were working the equations, I would prefer a reference frame which did not introduce fictitious forces on a universal scale.

Looks like

[Ohreally_factor]

Someone went and taunted the happy fun ball.

Or....

[fleener]

Or it's evidence of the opposite, that galaxies are not coalescing, but expanding.

Meanwhile, at the alien overlord weapons lab

[IronChefMorimoto]

G'nok: "Dammit, G'nariak -- I told you to calibrate the Star Destructor targeting computers yesterday!"

G'nariak: "Sorry, sir. I had to take the wife to her obstetrician yesterday during lunch; I was in a rush; it won't happen again."

G'nok: "Damned right it won't. The Earthlings SAW the Star Destructor test! They were supposed to EXPERIENCE the test!"

G'nariak: "Again, sorry sir -- I'll make it up to you."

G'nok: "You damn well will -- we have to explain to G'tariak why his vacation home at the edge of the galaxy isn't there anymore. Dumbass!"

IronChefMorimoto

That was the good news

[carcosa30]

The bad news is it's heading straight for us.

Re:1.5 million miles per hour!!

[IceAgeComing]

If everything around it is also moving that fast and in the same direction, then from the star's frame of reference, it's standing still.

Re:1.5 million miles per hour!!

[Chess_the_cat]

If everything around it is also moving that fast and in the same direction, then from the star's frame of reference, it's standing still.

But that's just it. Everything else is moving in the opposite direction.

Re:1.5 million miles per hour!!

[essreenim]

Exactly, although conceivably, the star has had a great deal of its mass stripped away by the event in question. The only predictable change would be due to gravitation from the black hole and the resultant cling-shot of acceleration afterwards. An interesting point though. That star is / was ( we are observing history - the star would have been very far away and is by now much much further away) in a different time frame. From the point of view of an observer at the outcast star, they are actually moving a

Re:1.5 million miles per hour!!

[imuffin]

But it's not. From TFA: By measuring its line-of-sight velocity, it suggests that the star is moving almost directly away from the galactic center. "It's like standing curbside watching a baseball fly out of the park," said Brown.

So everything around it isn't moving at the same speed; it's moving 1.5 million MPH away from the center of the galaxy.

---
watch funny commercials

Re:1.5 million miles per hour!!

[witte]

It's relative speed to us (eg. the sun, or any other mass).
In the void of space this has no consequences for the mass that is speeding. (Until it collides with something that has a different speed.)

Abruptly increasing acceleration could rip it apart though, but that's another story.

Re:1.5 million miles per hour!!

[juangonzo]

They aren't torn apart for multiple reasons. One of them is that there is nothing for them to hit that will tear them apart. Going millions of mph is different in a vacuum than it is in the earth's atmosphere. To get more complex, to the star it's not moving, the rest of the galaxy is. To understand more of what I'm talking about read about the reference frame in any basics physics book.

Re:1.5 million miles per hour!!

[Tim C]

Torn apart by what? If it's not accelerating, and it's not undergoing frictional drag passing through a fluid or gas cloud, etc, why would it be torn apart? There's no force acting on it to tear it apart.

(Also, what planets? I did RTFA, and didn't see any mention of planets...)

Re:1.5 million miles per hour!!

[merlin_jim]

I just wonder why the star and the planets are not torn apart by such huge speeds?

a) we're not sure it has planets.

b) it's not velocity that kills, it's acceleration.

c) this acceleration can only be explained by current theory if it was a gravitational acceleration.

d) gravitational acceleration acts on all elements of an object equally, meaning that there was no force from the acceleration itself acting to tear the object apart. Just like when you're in freefall, you don't feel gravity acting on you.

Now TIDAL gravity can tear objects apart, but since the gravitationally assisted acceleration likely happened in the galactic core, the tides were probably pretty gentle... the tidal force at a black hole's horizon can be expressed as a function of mass over surface area; the bigger the hole, the less the tides.

Re:1.5 million miles per hour!!

[merlin_jim]

That's not entirely true. The force excerted by gravity goes as 1/r^2, where r is the distance between both masses.

If you have for example two large m1 and m2 each attached one end of a very long pole in a gravitational field caused by another mass M, the mass nearest to the M would experience a slightly stronger force than the other one. So that could, in theory, break the pole.

What you're talking about is tidal gravity. And tidal gravity is exactly what caused one star of a companion to be accelerated away while the other one was captured into an orbit.

On the scale of the objects themselves, though, the tides were probably extremely gentle. AFAIK companion stars are generally light-months apart. Even if this star was a planetary system, it's nearest planets are probably only a few light-minutes away...

Re:1.5 million miles per hour!!

[LurkerXXX]

Really? I bet if we put you in a rocket, and had it accelerate and the acceleration built up very very very slowly, you would still turn to jelly when the acceleration finally hit 20 G's.

Re:1.5 million miles per hour!!

[WhiplashII]

Yes, but that would make you a jerk, so the poster is correct!

Seriously though, what kills you is the difference in acceleration of the top and bottom - which is what the previous person said.

Re:1.5 million miles per hour!!

[LurkerXXX]

Right on the tidel forces.

As for his body being accelerated and his blood isn't... That's only the case in as much as right now your body is trying to accelerate at 9.8 m/s/s toward the center of the earth. Your bone structure and muscles lets you resist it. Your blood is also trying to accelerate towards the center of the earth at the same rate. Your arteries and veins and your heart let you resist that as well.

Your body and blood aren't accelerating at different rates. They both deal with the same acceleration in the same way, with it acting as 'weight'. The problem with weight/acceleration is that your body was designed to handle only so much of it.

Now let's kick it up a notch. blood pooling...

Imagine a test pilot in a centrafuge machine. It takes him up to 6 G's and holds him there for an hour. Just like he was on a planet with 6x earth's gravity.

His body is accelerating at 6 G's.
His blood is also accelerating at 6 G's (otherwise it would all leak out the back of his chair and that would be a 'bad thing' ;)

His blood resists accelerating as you say, but so does his body (Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest tend to stay at rest, bodies in motion tend to stay in motion and all that). Nevertheless, the back of his chair is causing the lot of them to accellerate at 6 G's.

His heart, however is now trying to pump blood that 'weighs' 6x as much. The heart can't pump the heavier blood as easily or 'high' (relatively) as it could normally. His veins can't constrict as much as they normally would to force blood back into the right areas of the body, because the blood is pushing against them with much greater force. The veins also have valves to prevent blood from flowing back the wrong way, but these may give way under the additional pressure.

The blood is not accelerating at a different rate from the body, it's still in his veins and artieris, and so still in his body. His body is being accellerating at 6 G's and the blood, being trapped inside, is going along for the ride. But it acts as a much heavier fluid. So it starts to pool in the lower extremeties since it can't be pumped efficiently. Depending on how strong his heart is (and resilient his veins are), he might be able to handle 6 G's for a good long while. But if they aren't in quite as good of shape he might not be able to pump the blood well enough and might black out after a few seconds or minutes.

Once again the blood isn't accelerating at a different rate than the body (both are resisting being accelerated), anymore than your blood and body accelerate at different speeds on earth, it just has a higher 'weight' then the body was structurally designed to pump.

The next stage is to crank up the centrifuge chair/other-planet to 1000g's density. 1000 G's. Now the test pilot's ribs are trying to hold up themselves and the muscles etc attached to them. But they weight 1000x as much. The bones werent' constructed to hold such a high weight, so they snap. The 'body' isn't accelerating at a different rate than the... 'body', but it breaks down because it wasn't designed for such mechanical forces. Everything is being accelerated (and trying to resist it). Everything is accelerating at the same rate. It just can't handle the rate.

Re:1.5 million miles per hour!!

[Dana P'Simer]

First, there is no indication that they have any evidience that the star has planets. Second, how exactly would mere velocity tear the start apart? I would not be suprised if, in the star's distant past, when it had it's close encounter with the super massive black hole at the center of the galaxy that some significant tidal forces were not placed on the star's contents. However, it appears that the star is stable, for the moment, ( moments in stellar lifetimes take millions of years ). The mere fact that the star is moving fast is not enough to tear it apart, there would have to be some other gravitational or kinetic forces at work. Do you realize that,

simply owing to the earth's rotation [hypertextbook.com], you are, at this moment, moving at a rate of approximately 1000 mph? Probably less since you are probably not at the equator.

Also, Due to the earth's orbit around the sun [ucar.edu], were are traveling at approximately 67000mph.

According to findings of COBE, our galaxy is traveling at 300 k/s [hypertextbook.com] or about 1.34 million mph.

Why aren't you torn apart?

Re:1.5 million miles per hour!!

[Dana P'Simer]

But you are forgetting that we are talking about sublight speed. The damage done by a photon torpedo can easily disrupt the fragile warp fields. Warp speeds are created by sucessive warp shells like those nesting dolls. To reach warp 9 you need 9 nested warp shells.

I guess I spend more time infront of the tube than you :P

Little relativistic phenomena

[grahamsz]

They are only moving a 0.002c. I can't be bothered doing the calculations but it's probably not significant.

Googling it

[grahamsz]

Just go to google and search for

"1500000mph / c"

I still maintain that it's 0.002c or 0.2% of the speed of light

Am i missing something?

Re:Little relativistic phenomena

[EulerX07]

The speed of light (c) is 300 000 km/s. 670/300000 = 0.0022. It's going at 0.0022c.

Don't worry, you're the not the first person to post disinformation on this site and get modded up as informative. Also, you should have worked with the metric values instead of messing around with the imperial values. Ye olde english system is great for measuring stuff in your trousers, but not as great for astrophysics.

Re:All kinds of morons on Slashdot...

[Hyecee]

I think he might have meant if we were to be run over by a random sun moving at that speed. Could be wrong, though.

Re:All kinds of morons on Slashdot...

[Skye16]

No kidding. We worry about asteroids; imagine catching a star in the face.

Re:1.5 Million MPH...

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Look up the topic of Doppler shift. And it's relative to the galaxy, isn't that pretty obvious from the context?

Re:1.5 Million MPH...

[maird]

I don't actually know how they measured it (and I'm not an astrophysicist and don't offer this as opinion, let alone fact) but 1.5 million miles per hour probably creates a significant doppler shift. The spectra of stars shows distinct bands that correspond with the absorption of photons at specific wavelengths. The reason the absorption is at specific, discrete wavelengths is that electrons in specific elements (e.g. Hydrogen, Helium, etc) absorb at specific wavelengths. The distance between absorption lin

Re:Any astronomers out there?

[FirienFirien]

The ergosphere around a black hole is full of matter that's orbiting the black hole at a speed that's not enough to get back out again - as a fast body comes through, it slingshots through the buzz of energy provided and comes out faster than it went in. This is above the point of no return, but there's still a lot of energy flying around there.

Re:Any astronomers out there?

[DarkHand]

They're just basically saying that the star was slingshotted(new word?) out of the galaxy by way of the black hole at the center of the galaxy. The same way that we use planets to slingshot probes and increase their velocity to get them to their destinations faster. Just at a much larger scale.

Re:Any astronomers out there?

[SirBruce]

I think the correct verb is "slingshat".

Bruce

Re:Any astronomers out there?

[Somegeek]

All of the real astronomers are busy right now. Press 1 to be connected to a geek instead or 2 to leave a message.
-1-
Thank you.
The answer is : Black holes can be compilations of many stars. The one at the center of our galaxy that they are talking about is currently believed to be 3.7 million times the mass of our Sun (give or take 1.5 million).
This is just like we slingshot space probes past planets to get a gravitational speed boost, this star got pulled in towards the black hole but barely missed and got a the mother of all gravitational slingshots. I would guess that the fact that it had a companion was unimportant, and could have happened if it had been it had been a single star on the right trajectory.

IANAA.

Re:Any astronomers out there?

[Tired and Emotional]

You don't get a slingshot effect from the black hole at the centre of the galaxy in the same way as you do from a planet because the black hole is at rest. The presence of a companion was crucial.

Its more like a satelite performing a rocket burn near the sun in order to gain velocity. Because the exhaust comes out moving more slowly (relative the the far away observer) than it would if the satellite was in higher orbit, the satelite gets much more boost.

In the case of a binary system and the black hole,

Re:Any astronomers out there?

[another_henry]

So why would a black hole produce a greater gravitational force at a distance than any massive star?

It doesn't, but the black hole is very massive - considerably more massive than any star in the galaxy.

And why would a great force at the centre of the galaxy be inclined to spit out stars at huge velocities?

It's tricky to explain and not terribly easy to get your head around, but I think the principle is similar to this demonstration [grand-illusions.com] (check out the video). The grav. potential energy of the companion

Black holes have no hair

[Ohreally_factor]

'cause black holes don't have a size limit.

Do you mean that they don't have a mass limit? Because they definitely have a size limit. They're 0-dimensional.

Or are you thinking of the Schwarzschild radius?

Re:FYI...Speed of Light

[gnuman99]

If the star travelled @ 99% c, it would still be at rest relative to itself. So, it would not be doing anything special.

Re:This must mean

[RichMan]

Sling shot:

1) have lots of mass and dive into a gravity well. The gravity field and the mass cause you to accelerate into the well.
2) drop mass at the bottom of the gravity well
3) remaining mass has extra speed from the dive but will feel less pull back into the well on the way out
4) result is increased speed away from the gravity well, cost was loss of mass into the well

It is quite easy to see how this could happen to a star getting sucked into the well around a black hole.

Re:This must mean

[thpr]

This must mean that the galaxy is actually speeding up?

No

Or does it just mean the stars mass is greater than it was before..?

Yes, but only very slightly... since it's traveling at about 1/500th the speed of light, it did gain some mass, but very, very little relative to its original mass

If its neither of these, why has the star suddenly broken away from the galaxy

It all has to do with the angle and distance at which the star approached the black hole.

If it passes by a long distance away or at a slow

Re:What if there were planets orbiting it?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Depends on how close the system came to the large gravitational mass that flung them off. If they passed really close, and the pull of the larger body exceeded the pull of the star, then yes, a lot of stuff would transfer orbit to the larger body, or been slingshotted off into space.

If the approach wasn't that close, then the planets would still have been a lot more attracted to the "traveling star" than anything else. Their orbits may have been altered slightly by the influence of the larger mass, but t

Re:Why?

[pizzaman100]

Another disgruntled Kerry supporter. Going to Canada is understandable, but leaving the galaxy?

Re:Moving

[eutychus_awakes]

While witty, that scenario doesn't hold up if you consider that either the star or the galaxy had to undergo a (relatively) brief period of acceleration in order to exhibit the behavior we currently see. The probability of every star in the galaxy except this one undergoing that kind of acceleration is minuscule - however, the probability of one star meeting the conditions of the proposed hypothesis is quite high.

That's how we solve these kinds of paradox problems in relativity. The classic "Twin Parado

Re:Astronomy / Math question

[chinton]

Quoting a related space.com [space.com] story:

It is travelling at twice the speed needed to escape the gravitational clutches of the galaxy. About 80 million or 100 million years from now, Brown said, the star will exit the galaxy and become a lone wanderer of intergalactic space.

Re:Question

[shrubya]

1: the problem with hitching a ride on a passing asteroid is that you need to match speed with it if you want to survive the landing. And if you can match its speed then you don't need its help any more, because that takes the same amount of energy as just going there yourself without the asteroid.

Maybe you could use enourmous bungee cords and rocket-propelled grappling hooks to latch on more gently, but if something snaps halfway through the process you'll be flung at high speed in entirely the wrong dire