Scientists find chunk of blown-apart star hurtling through Milky Way at breakneck speed
A chunk of stellar shrapnel is careening toward the edge of our Milky Way galaxy at almost 2 million mph (3.2 million kph), a new study reports.
"The star is moving so fast that it's almost certainly leaving the galaxy," study co-lead author J.J. Hermes, an associate professor of astronomy at Boston University, said in a statement.
The star, known as LP 40-365, currently lies about 2,000 light-years from Earth. And calling it a star may be a bit generous, actually; Hermes and his colleagues think it's a hunk of a superdense stellar corpse called a white dwarf that was blown apart in a violent supernova explosion after gobbling up too much mass from a companion.
More:
https://www.space.com/runaway-dead-star-hurtles-through-milky-way