Related papers: An Alternative Origin for Hypervelocity Stars
Young stars observed in the distant Galactic halo are usually thought to have formed elsewhere, either in the Galactic disk or perhaps the Galactic center, and subsequently ejected at high velocities to their current position. However, some…
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…
The origin of our Galaxy's high-velocity clouds (HVCs) remains a mystery after many decades of effort. In this paper, we use the TNG50 simulation of the IllustrisTNG project to identify cool, dense clouds that match observations of Galactic…
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…
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…
There is a population of stars with velocities in excess of 500 km s$^{-1}$ relative to the Galactic center. Many, perhaps most, of these hyper-velocity stars (HVSs) are B stars, similar to the disk and S stars in a nuclear cluster around a…
The fastest moving stars provide insight into several fundamental properties of the Galaxy, including the escape velocity as a function of Galactocentric radius, the total mass, and the nature and frequency of stellar encounters with the…
The paucity of hypervelocity stars (HVSs) known to date has severely hampered their potential to investigate the stellar population of the Galactic Centre and the Galactic Potential. The first Gaia data release gives an opportunity to…
We examine whether disrupted binary stars can fuel black hole growth. In this mechanism, tidal disruption produces a single hypervelocity star (HVS) ejected at high velocity and a former companion star bound to the black hole. After a…
We report the discovery of two new unbound hypervelocity stars (HVSs) from the LAMOST spectroscopic surveys. They are respectively a B2V type star of ~ 7 M$_{\rm \odot}$ with a Galactic rest-frame radial velocity of 502 km/s at a…
Based on long baseline (5-7 years) multi-epoch HST/ACS photometry, used previously to measure the proper motion of M31, we present the proper motions (PMs) of 13 main-sequence Milky Way halo stars. The sample lies at an average distance of…
About 20% of all massive stars in the Milky Way have unusually high velocities, the origin of which has puzzled astronomers for half a century. We argue that these velocities originate from strong gravitational interactions between single…
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galactic nuclei can eject hypervelocity stars (HVSs). Using restricted three-body integrations, we study the properties of stars ejected by circular, binary SMBHs as a function of their mass ratios $q =…
We investigate the possibility that the recently discovered Hercules Milky Way satellite is in fact a stellar stream in formation, thereby explaining its very elongated shape with an axis ratio of 3 to 1. Under the assumption that Hercules…
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…
Stars slingshotted by the supermassive black hole at the Galactic centre will escape the Milky Way so quickly that their trajectories will be almost straight lines. Previous works have shown how these `hypervelocity stars' are subsequently…
We present evidence for a ring of stars in the plane of the Milky Way, extending at least from l = 180 deg to l = 227 deg with turnoff magnitude $g \sim 19.5$; the ring could encircle the Galaxy. We infer that the low Galactic latitude…
We report new constraints on the local escape speed of our Galaxy. Our analysis is based on a sample of high velocity stars from the RAVE survey and two previously published datasets. We use cosmological simulations of disk galaxy formation…
We have used infrared and radio observations to search for a dwarf galaxy associated with the high-velocity cloud (HVC) known as Complex H. Complex H is a large (> 400 deg^2) and probably nearby (d = 27 kpc) HVC whose location in the…
High-velocity clouds (HVCs) are composed of neutral hydrogen (HI) moving at velocities that deviate from the general rotational motion of the Milky Way. Currently, the origins of the HVCs remain poorly known due to the difficulty in…