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Related papers: MMT Hypervelocity Star Survey

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Hypervelocity stars (HVSs) found in the Galactic halo are probably the dynamical products of interactions between (binary) stars and the massive black hole(s) (MBH) in the Galactic center (GC). It has been shown that the detected HVSs are…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-05-28 Fupeng Zhang , Youjun Lu , Qingjuan Yu

Hypervelocity stars (HVSs) escaping away from the Galactic halo are dynamical products of interactions of stars with the massive black hole(s) (MBH) in the Galactic Center (GC). They are mainly B-type stars with their progenitors unknown.…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2011-05-13 Youjun Lu , Fupeng Zhang , Qingjuan Yu

Several dozen hypervelocity star (HVS) candidates have been reported based on the second data release of Gaia (Gaia DR2). However, it has been proven that the radial velocities of some Gaia HVS candidates are not reliable. In this paper, we…

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics · Physics 2020-05-13 Jiao Li , Shi Jia , Yan Gao , Deng-Kai Jiang , Thomas Kupfer , Ulrich Heber , Chao Liu , Xue-Fei Chen , Zhan-Wen Han

Hypervelocity stars (HVSs) are stars with velocities exceeding their local escape velocities. Searching for HVSs and studying their origins can be an important way to study the properties of the Milky Way. In this paper, we utilize precise…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-10-01 Haozhu Fu , Yang Huang , Huawei Zhang

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…

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics · Physics 2020-09-09 Patrick Neunteufel

Stars within 0.1 pc of the supermassive black hole Sgr A* at the Galactic centre are expected to encounter a cluster of stellar-mass black holes (BHs) that have segregated to that region. Some of these stars will scatter off an orbiting BH…

Astrophysics · Physics 2008-07-15 Ryan M. O'Leary , Abraham Loeb

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…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 A. Sesana , P. Madau , F. Haardt

Hypervelocity stars (HVSs) unbound to the Galaxy can be formed with extreme stellar interactions. Observational evidence comes from measurements of radial velocities (RVs) of objects crossing the Galactic halo and of tangential velocities…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-05-22 Ralf-Dieter Scholz

We present the serendipitous discovery of the fastest Main Sequence hyper-velocity star (HVS) by the Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey (S5). The star S5-HVS1 is a $\sim 2.35$ M$_\odot$ A-type star located at a distance of $\sim…

We measure the projected rotational velocities of the late B-type hypervelocity stars HVS7 and HVS8 from high resolution spectroscopy to be 60 +/- 17 km/s and 260 +/- 70 km/s. The 'slow' rotation of HVS7 is in principle consistent with…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 Mercedes Lopez-Morales , Alceste Z. Bonanos

When a binary of early-type stars from the young stellar populations in the Galactic center (GC) region is scattered to the vicinity of the supermassive black hole (SMBH) Sgr~$\rm{A}^{*}$, one of the components would be tidally ejected as…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-03-27 Chunyang Cao , Fukun Liu , Shuo Li , Xian Chen , Ke Wang

In this paper, we investigate the link between the hypervelocity stars (HVSs) discovered in the Galactic halo and the S-stars moving in the Galactic center (GC), under the hypothesis that they are both the products of the tidal breakup of…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-11 Fupeng Zhang , Youjun Lu , Qingjuan Yu

We obtain Keck HIRES spectroscopy of HVS5, one of the fastest unbound stars in the Milky Way halo. We show that HVS5 is a 3.62 +- 0.11 Msun main sequence B star at a distance of 50 +- 5 kpc. The difference between its age and its flight…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-05 Warren R. Brown , Judith G. Cohen , Margaret J. Geller , Scott J. Kenyon

We have performed N-body simulations of the formation of hyper-velocity stars (HVS) in the centre of the Milky Way due to inspiralling intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs). We considered IMBHs of different masses, all starting from…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-11 Holger Baumgardt , Alessia Gualandris , Simon Portegies Zwart

We present an analysis of the chemical abundances and kinematics of six low-mass dwarf stars, previously claimed to be candidate hypervelocity stars (HVSs). We obtained moderate-resolution ($R\sim$ 6000) spectra of these stars to estimate…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2019-07-17 Bum-Suk Yeom , Young Sun Lee , Jae-Rim Koo , Timothy C. Beers , Young Kwang Kim

Recent discoveries have shown that a population of hypervelocity stars (HVSs) originate from the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). We use three such HVSs as dynamical tracers to constrain the past orbit of the LMC. Since each star was ejected…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-04-07 Scott Lucchini , Jiwon Jesse Han

Several tens of hyper-velocity stars (HVSs) have been discovered escaping our Galaxy. These stars share a common origin in the Galactic centre and are distributed anisotropically in Galactic longitude and latitude. We examine the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-16 Kastytis Zubovas , Graham A. Wynn , Alessia Gualandris

Following a dynamical encounter with Sgr A*, binaries in the Galactic Centre (GC) can be tidally separated and one member star ejected as a hyper-velocity star (HVS) with a velocity beyond the escape speed of the Milky Way. As GC-born…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-03-09 F. A. Evans , T. Marchetti , E. M. Rossi

We measure proper motions with the Hubble Space Telescope for 16 extreme radial velocity stars, mostly unbound B stars in the Milky Way halo. Twelve of these stars have proper motions statistically consistent with zero, and thus have radial…

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-23 Warren R. Brown , Jay Anderson , Oleg Y. Gnedin , Howard E. Bond , Margaret J. Geller , Scott J. Kenyon

We show that measuring the velocity components of hypervelocity stars (HVSs) can discriminate between modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) and Newtonian gravity. HVSs are ejected from the Galactic center on radial trajectories with a null…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-03-10 Sankha Subhra Chakrabarty , Luisa Ostorero , Arianna Gallo , Stefano Ebagezio , Antonaldo Diaferio