In astro-ph/0501177, Warren Brown, Margaret Geller, Scott Kenyon, and Michael Kurtz announce the discovery of a star which is traveling out of the Milky Way galactic halo at a speed of at least around 700 kilometers per second (.2% of the speed of light.) That’s the fastest ever observed, and the authors speculate that this may be an example of a star which interacted with the black hole at the center of our galaxy. For comparrison, the escape velocity for a star located at its current distance from the galactic center (50 kiloparsecs) is 300 kilometers per second.
So I guess we should all say good bye to SDSS J090745.0+024507. Say “hi” to the intergalactic medium for us, won’t you?
O brave new quantum world!