(sci/tech) Mysterious Star Streaks Into the Milky Way

Astronomers have discovered a rogue star storming into the galaxy at 1.6 million miles per hour. Astronomers are debating where this rogue star originated. The leading theory is that it was ejected from the Large Megellanic Cloud (LMC), a relatively close galactic neighbor. Another theory also being considered is that it was ejected from our galactic center.




The universe is a strange place. I've always wondered if it were possible for a rogue star to move from galaxy to galaxy. Now it seems likely.

What would be even stranger is if that star had a planetary system orbiting it, with life bearing planets.

Imagine life on a planet where the stars appeared as a distant cloud in the night sky, instead of the dusk to dawn blanket of light we are accustomed to.

Things that make you go, hmmm....


[edit on 15-11-2005 by BomSquad]

Good story. There are many galactic marvels out there waiting to be discovered. That's why I hate to see orbiting telescopes like Hubble abandoned.

[edit on 2005/11/15 by GradyPhilpott]

Space...the final frontier.

I've loved all things "space" for as long as I can remember.

Space exploration, whether by man, or machine, is one of the most important undertakings made by human kind.

We need to know what is out "there".

Not everyone agrees with me, I know we have plenty of things here to take care of as well. But we should never abandon our instinct to explore places where we have yet to go.

Ever onward and outward.

[edit on 15-11-2005 by BomSquad]

wow yes i think i seen this tonight,

i was looking up at the sky and saw a bright white light... at first i thought it was a plane but it did not move,

I guess this is what it was that i saw then,

Commander Keen Kid posted a story about an object he was observing that behaved oddly near cetus..

I bet he was first to discover it

we will call the star .. keenkid

Originally posted by asala
wow yes i think i seen this tonight,
I guess this is what it was that i saw then,

You need a high power observatory telescope to see HE 0437-5439, it's not a naked eye visual.
www.eso.org...

Most likely you saw the planet Venus.

Venus is well placed to be viewed this month in the southwestern sky shortly after sunset. It is the brightest thing in Earth's sky other than the Sun and Moon. Unless you wait too late, you can't miss it.
www.space.com...

Good find. I think the idea of a rouge star speeding thru the edges of the universe intriguing. You may note that they think it came from the center of the galaxy. But its age doesnt match up with the time it would have taken to travel that far.

It was interesting enough to post some additional threads, even though Regenmacher beat me to some.

For the discerning diva

Speeding star observed with VLT hints at massive black hole.
Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers have recorded a massive star moving at more than 2.6 million kilometres per hour.

For the geek on the street

Astronomers may have discovered a massive black hole
Astronomers from British and German universities have made a new discovery which could provide evidence for a previously unknown supermassive black hole millions of times heavier than the sun.

For the Astrophysists of ATS

Astrophysics, abstract astro-ph/0511321
From: Ulrich Heber [view email]
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2005 18:21:29 GMT (122kb)

HE 0437-5439 -- an unbound hyper-velocity main-sequence B-type star
Authors: Heinz Edelmann, Ralf Napiwotzki, Uli Heber, Norbert Christlieb, Dieter Reimers
Comments: 13 pages, 4 figures. Astrophysical Journal Letters, accepted

We report the discovery of a 16th magnitude star, HE0437-5439, with a heliocentric radial velocity of +723+-3km/s. A quantitative spectral analysis of high-resolution optical spectra obtained with the VLT and the UVES spectrograph shows that HE0437-5439 is a main sequence B-type star with Teff=20350K, log g=3.77, solar within a factor of a few helium abundance and metal content, rotating at v sin i=54km/s. Using appropriate evolutionary tracks we derive a mass of 8 Msun and a corresponding distance of 61 kpc.

Here is a link to the paper with more information about the star.

arxiv.org...

Originally posted by Regenmacher

Venus is well placed to be viewed this month in the southwestern sky shortly after sunset. It is the brightest thing in Earth's sky other than the Sun and Moon. Unless you wait too late, you can't miss it.
www.space.com...

Actually Mars is extremelly bright, then again I am away from the lights of any mayor cities in the middle of nowhere in North Dakota. Every morning at around 5-6 AM or so, I see Mars to the right of the Moon and Venus to the left of the Moon, they are virtually the same brightness to the naked eye, except that Mars is red and Venus is white of course.

There are times out here when it is too cloudy that the only three visible objects in the sky are the Moon, Mars and Venus. The view is awesome out here.

[edit on 17-11-2005 by Muaddib]

Originally posted by BomSquad
We need to know what is out "there".

True, we do need to know what is out there. However, that might be a little hard since the government covers up much of its discoveries. There is simply enough to prove that ET life exists but the govenment isn't going to let us know that or else we'd go nuts. That is the reason for the cover-ups and I know people would panic cuz my grandparents do since they heard about the sightings in my area. Some are just ignorant and they try to explain things using religian (mainly) and that is the problem. Of coerse, there might be more to this than just ETs..........doesn't it keep you wondering? It's possible and more likely than one would think. Telescopes alone have discovered many of the universe's secrets (including mechanical "unidentified flying objects".) The whole idea of space exploration is to discover new things about our universe and the things that it is home to. The government is keeping all the good stuff to its self.

As for the star itself, I don't have much to say about it other than that it was an excellent discovery.

Hyperfast Star Proven To Be Alien

ScienceDaily (Jan. 29, 2008) — A young star is speeding away from the Milky Way so fast that astronomers have been puzzled by where it came from; based on its young age it has traveled too far to have come from our galaxy. Now by analyzing its velocity, light intensity, and for the first time its tell-tale elemental composition, Carnegie astronomers Alceste Bonanos and Mercedes López-Morales, and collaborators Ian Hunter and Robert Ryans from Queen's University Belfast have determined that it came from our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The result suggests that it was ejected from that galaxy by a yet-to-be-observed massive black hole

www.sciencedaily.com...

Another article about the star, using language to 'hype' its rogue nature.

"Alien" and "Space" together seem to tickle the fancy of the youth.
DocMoreau

see this is what we get when we dont demand congress and the universal congress to stop building highways near our living structures!

Now we gettin all this traffic!

Breaking news?

This thread is 3 years old.

I dont get it. Is this still around?

Originally posted by dgtempe
Breaking news?

This thread is 3 years old.

I dont get it. Is this still around?

Maybe it has been up so long that the Galaxy has made a complete revolution- and the same rogue star is "streaking" back at us AGAIN!!!

This an update ive been looking forward too, 3 yrs ago i read this thread and wondered what was going to happen as far as observations and determinations where going to come from it, hopefully over the next few weeks we will get all the data from 3 yrs of observation,

you dont need a fancy warp drive to travel through space,you just need to hitch a ride on something propelled by the natural forces of the galaxy,such as black holes,magnetars,nuetron stars and so on!

when you can create your own gravity singularities....now thats when it gets interesting.imagine what you could propel with one of them....bullets...cats...taco's!

i have a fantasy or traversing the galaxy in just this manner,going from sling shot to sling shot picking up speed,seeing it all.....gotta be immortal first of course!

I guess it is not breaking news except that the article I posted was new. I could have created a new thread, but thought I would contribute here.

I actually thought that it was a 'new' thread.

Now I wonder if the 'news' is just recycling stories from three years ago, or if we are in a 'place' in our yearly turn that we can better see this phenomena?

Sorry for any confusion
DocMoreau