A "failed" supernova accelerated the star's remnant to unusual speed: 900,000 kilometers per hour.
The Atomic Rocket website, by the way, mentions hypervelocity stars that move even faster: roughly four times as fast as this supernova remnant. The theory offered in or about 2011 was that they were accelerated by a close brush with the Sagittarius A* supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center.
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“We’ve had our differences, but he’s seen the light … and I made sure he moved toward it, instead of coming back.”
Quote:The lack of iron group elements in SDSSJ1240+6710 suggests that the star only underwent a partial supernova before the nuclear burning died out.
Lead author Professor Boris Gänsicke, from the department of physics at the University of Warwick, UK, said: "This star is unique because it has all the key features of a white dwarf but it has this very high velocity and unusual abundances that make no sense when combined with its low mass.
"It has a chemical composition which is the fingerprint of nuclear burning, a low mass and a very high velocity; all of these facts imply that it must have come from some kind of close binary system and it must have undergone thermonuclear ignition. It would have been a type of supernova, but of a kind that that we haven't seen before."
The Atomic Rocket website, by the way, mentions hypervelocity stars that move even faster: roughly four times as fast as this supernova remnant. The theory offered in or about 2011 was that they were accelerated by a close brush with the Sagittarius A* supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center.
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“We’ve had our differences, but he’s seen the light … and I made sure he moved toward it, instead of coming back.”