Related papers: Runaway Dwarf Carbon Stars as Candidate Supernova …
High-velocity stars in the Galactic halo, e.g. the so-called hyper-velocity stars (HVS), are important tracers of the properties of the dark matter halo, in particular its mass. Based on the SDSS DR6 spectral database a search for the…
High-velocity stars are interesting targets to unveil the formation of the Milky Way. In fact they can be recently accreted from an infalling dwarf galaxies or they can be the result of a turbulent merging of galaxies. Gaia is providing the…
Recent observations have found a growing number of hypervelocity stars with speeds of $\approx 1500-2500\,$km\,s$^{-1}$ which could have only been produced through thermonuclear supernovae in white dwarf binaries. Most of the observed…
We report 23 stars having Galactocentric velocities larger than $450~\mathrm{km\,s}^{-1}$ in the final data release of the APOGEE survey. This sample was generated using space velocities derived by complementing the high quality radial…
Subdwarf B (sdB) stars are hot, sub-luminous stars which are thought to be core-helium burning with thin hydrogen envelopes. The mechanism by which these stars lose their envelopes has been controversial but it has been argued that binary…
We report the discovery of seven high proper motion stars with proper motions between about 0.7 and 2.2 arcsec/yr. They were detected in an archival search using multi-epoch positions in the optical SuperCOSMOS Sky Surveys and in the…
Stars ejected from the Galactic centre can be used to place important constraints on the Milky Way potential. Since existing hypervelocity stars are too distant to accurately determine orbits, we have conducted a search for nearby…
Dwarf carbon stars make up the largest fraction of carbon stars in the Galaxy with around 1200 candidates known to date primarily from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. They either possess primordial carbon-enhancements, or are polluted by mass…
Most stars in our Galaxy with photospheric C/O>1 (carbon stars) are not giants but dwarfs. The newly-recognized class of dwarf carbon (dC) stars joins the growing family of stars with peculiar abundances that are now recognized as products…
Carbon stars (with C/O> 1) were long assumed to all be giants, because only AGB stars dredge up significant carbon into their atmospheres. The case is nearly iron-clad now that the formerly mysterious dwarf carbon (dC) stars are actually…
Hypervelocity stars (HVS) move so fast that they are unbound to the Galaxy. When they were first discovered in 2005, dynamical ejection from the supermassive black hole (SMBH) in the Galactic Centre (GC) was suggested as their origin. The…
Recent studies on hypervelocity stars (HVSs) have generated a need to understand the high velocity limits of binary systems. If runaway binary systems with high movement speeds well in excess of 200km/s were to exist, it would have…
The project Massive Unseen Companions to Hot Faint Underluminous Stars from SDSS (MUCHFUSS) aims at finding hot subdwarf stars with massive compact companions (massive white dwarfs M>1.0 Msun, neutron stars or stellar mass black holes). The…
We report the discovery of 30 stars with extreme space velocities ($>$ 480 km/s) in the Gaia-DR2 archive. These stars are a subset of 1743 stars with high-precision parallax, large tangential velocity ($v_{tan}>$ 300 km/s), and measured…
The discovery of hypervelocity stars (HVS) leaving our galaxy with speeds of nearly $10^{3}$ km s$^{-1}$ has provided strong evidence towards the existence of a massive compact object at the galaxy's center. HVS ejected via the disruption…
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…
Hills (1988) predicted that runaway stars could be accelerated to velocities larger than 1000 km/s by dynamical encounters with the supermassive black hole (SMBH) in the Galactic center. The recently discovered hypervelocity star SDSS…
We present observations of the unusually luminous Type II supernova (SN) 2016gsd. With a peak absolute magnitude of V = $-$19.95 $\pm$ 0.08, this object is one of the brightest Type II SNe, and lies in the gap of magnitudes between the…
Runaway stars can result from core-collapse supernovae in multiple stellar systems. If the supernova disrupts the system, the companion gets ejected with its former orbital velocity. A clear identification of a runaway star can yield the…
We report the discovery of a new carbon rich white dwarf that was identified during a proper motion survey for cool white dwarfs based on photographic material used for the construction of the Guide Star Catalog II. Its large proper motion…