Hubble Spies Trailblazing Star Ripped from Stellar Nursery

Analysis by Ian O'Neill
Tue May 11, 2010 06:49 PM ET



Sometimes even the biggest stars can be bullied. And in this new Hubble Space Telescope observation, a large star has been ejected from its place of birth, probably after being catapulted by the overwhelming gravitational force of a couple of larger stellar siblings.

This runaway star is traveling at high speed, fast enough to be ejected from its galaxy entirely. There's no turning back, it is destined for a lonely future charging toward the void between the galaxies. The star is currently 375 light-years from its suspected birthplace (a giant star cluster called R136 inside the Large Magellanic Cloud) and flying through its galaxy at 400,000 kilometers per hour -- a speed that would cover the distance between the Earth and the moon in just an hour.

But how did the massive star on the outskirts of the 30 Doradus Nebula get blasted away? There is no known mechanism that allows a star to travel at these speeds by itself, so astronomers studying the Hubble images believe there were another two stars implicit in sending the third to a lonely death.

30 Doradus (also known as the Tarantula Nebula) is a chaotic breeding ground for the most massive stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, located about 170,000 light-years from Earth. In fact, several stellar heavyweights topping 100 solar masses (nearly the maximum mass for a star) are known to live there, so this nebula is an ideal place to study how and why these stars grow so big.

more

http://news.discovery.com/space/hubble-spies-trailblazing-star-ripped-from-stellar-nursery.html

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/runaway-star.html