7 Scary & Weird Facts About Space

Hypervelocity Star

Hypervelocity stars travel the galaxy at 1000 km/sec. They’re made when one star in a binary system gets sucked into the supermassive black hole in the middle of a galaxy, and its partner is flung out 100x faster than other stars, sometimes faster than the galactic escape velocity. One neutron star in particular (RX J0822-4300) was measured to be moving at a record speed of over 1,500 km/s (0.5% of the speed of light) in 2007 by the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

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