Related papers: Hypervelocity Stars: Young and Heavy or Old and Li…
The disruption of a binary star system by the massive black hole at the Galactic Centre, SgrA*, can lead to the capture of one star around SgrA* and the ejection of its companion as a hypervelocity star (HVS). We consider the possibility…
Hypervelocity stars (HVS) are a class of stars moving at high enough velocities to be gravitationally unbound from the Galaxy. Ejection from a close binary system in which one of the components undergoes a thermonuclear supernova (SN) has…
We present an overview and a status report of HYPERMUCHFUSS (HYPER velocity or Massive Unseen Companions of Hot Faint Underluminious Stars Survey) aiming at the detection of a population of high velocity subluminous B stars and white…
We discuss the origin of the runaway early B-type star HD271791 and show that its extremely high velocity (\simeq 530-920 km/s) cannot be explained within the framework of the binary-supernova ejection scenario. Instead, we suggest that…
We report the results of a photometric search for giant stars associated with the cores of four high velocity clouds (HVCs) -- two of which are compact HVCs -- using the Las Campanas Du Pont 2.5 meter and Cerro Tololo Blanco 4 meter…
The data from the Gaia satellite led us to revise our conception of the Galaxy structure and history. Hitherto unknown components have been discovered and a deep re-thinking of what the Galactic halo is is in progress. We selected from the…
The discovery of hypervelocity binary stars (HVBs) in the Galactic halo would provide definite evidence of the existence of a massive black hole companion to Sgr A*. Here we use an hybrid approach to compute the rate of ejection and the…
The tremendous tidal force that is linked to the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of our galaxy is expected to strongly subdue star formation in its vicinity. Stars within 1" from the SMBH thus likely formed further from the…
We report the detection of five high-velocity stars in the core of the globular cluster NGC 2808. The stars lie on the the red giant branch and show total velocities between 40 and 45 km/s. For a core velocity dispersion sigma_c = 13.4…
The hyper-velocity star S5-HVS1, ejected 5 Myr ago from the Galactic Center at 1800 km/s, was most likely produced by tidal break-up of a tight binary by the supermassive black hole SgrA*. Taking a Monte Carlo approach, we show that the…
Very massive stars (VMS) are defined as stars with an initial mass in excess of 100 Msun. Because of their short lifetime and the shape of the stellar mass function, they are rare objects. Only about twenty of them are known in the Galaxy…
To explore the origin of high-velocity gas in the direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) we analyze absorption lines in the ultraviolet spectrum of a Galactic halo star that is located in front of the LMC at d=9.2 kpc distance. We…
We report new radial velocity measurements for 30 candidate runaway stars. We revise their age estimates and compute their past trajectories in the Galaxy in order to determine their birthplaces. We find that seven of the stars could be…
Two decades on, the study of hypervelocity stars is still in its infancy. These stars can provide novel constraints on the total mass of the Galaxy and its Dark Matter distribution. However how these stars are accelerated to such high…
We explore the hypothesis that some high-velocity runaway stars attain their peculiar velocities in the course of exchange encounters between hard massive binaries and a very massive star (either an ordinary 50-100 Msun star or a more…
We aim to characterize high-velocity (HiVel) stars in the solar vicinity both chemically and kinematically using the fourth data release of the RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE). We used a sample of 57 HiVel stars with Galactic rest-frame…
The accretion of metal-poor gas sustains galactic star formation. In the Milky Way, this process is fueled by high-velocity clouds (HVCs), yet their fundamental properties have remained elusive in the absence of stellar tracers. Here we…
Observations show the presence, in the halo of our Galaxy, of stars moving at velocities so high to require an acceleration mechanism involving the presence of a massive central black hole. Thus, in the frame of a galaxy hosting a…
In general, the atypical high velocity of some stars in the Galaxy can only be explained by invoking acceleration mechanisms related to extreme astrophysical events in the Milky Way. Using astrometric data from Gaia and the photometric…
High-velocity clouds (HVCs), which are gas clouds moving at high velocity relative to the galactic disk, may play a critical role in galaxy evolution, potentially supplying gas to the disk and triggering star formation. In this study, we…