The European Space Agency’s (ESA) telescope has discovered 55 objects racing away at speeds 80 times faster than the speed of sound from our galaxy’s “neighbor.”
According to Live Science, these 55 hyper-fast objects were captured by ESA’s Gaia sky-mapping spacecraft as they fled from the R136 star cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy located near the Milky Way Galaxy, which contains Earth.
55 luminous, hyper-speed objects fleeing the Large Magellanic Cloud – (Graphic: ESA).
The Large Magellanic Cloud serves as both a neighbor and a satellite, and it may become a future rival to the Milky Way.
This dwarf galaxy is rapidly approaching us, leading to a collision and merger with our galaxy in about 2 billion years.
However, the 55 “hasty” objects are moving far faster than the galaxy itself, darting in all directions.
Some of them are escaping the R136 star cluster at speeds exceeding 100,000 km/h, approximately 80 times faster than the speed of sound on Earth.
R136 star cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud – (Photo: NASA/ESA).
A research team led by astronomer Mitchel Stoop from the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) has identified these 55 objects as 55 stars ejected from their home by two catastrophic cosmic explosions.
Like all stars in their cluster, they are young and massive, with some having masses up to 300 times that of the Sun, despite being less than 2 million years old.
These runaway stars are large enough to end their lives in supernova explosions, leaving behind black holes or neutron stars, which will function like cosmic rockets, exploding up to 1,000 light-years away from their starting point.
According to researchers, the chaotic and dynamic environment in this star cluster caused the newborn stars to crowd together, intersect, and break their orbits due to each other’s gravitational pull.
This led to events powerful enough to eject some stars outward.
The first ejection event occurred around 1.8 million years ago, when the star cluster was newly formed.
Meanwhile, the second event happened only about 200,000 years ago. The stars fleeing in this second wave are moving more slowly and are not ejected in random directions like the first; instead, they follow more orderly paths.
Scientists also believe that these two events have caused R136 to launch away one-third of its largest stars over the past few million years, meaning that besides the aforementioned 55 objects, there are still others that Gaia has not detected.
Massive stars like those ejected from this young star cluster can shine millions of times brighter than the Sun, emitting most of their energy in the form of intense ultraviolet light.
However, this power comes at a cost: such massive stars burn their fuel for nuclear fusion very quickly, making their lifespans very short.
The estimated lifespan of this type of massive star is only a few million years, while our Sun can live up to 10 billion years.
