Star cluster hurtling towards earth

[Judi Lynn]

Star cluster hurtling towards earth
Andrew Griffin
Thursday 01 May 2014

A galaxy has thrown out a star cluster towards earth at more than two million miles per hour. But it is, thankfully, likely to miss our planet and “drift through the void between the galaxies for all time,” says the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Astronomers aren’t sure why the star cluster — named HVGC-1 — got thrown out at such high speed. One possibility is that the galaxy had two supermassive black holes at its core, experts said, which the stars came too close to. The black holes then threw out the star cluster like a slingshot.

Those black holes were formed by a long-ago collisions of two galaxies. That merged into one single galaxy — a fate that awaits Milky Way when it collides with Andromeda.

The cluster was found by astronomers studying the galaxy, who initially thought that its speed was the result of a glitch.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/star-cluster-hurtling-towards-earth-9311602.html

[SummerSnow]

1. Obamas fault

[Rosa Luxemburg]

3. LOL!

He causes tsunamis too

[NRaleighLiberal]

2. everything out there in space is hurtling somewhere!

interesting!

but...but....wait - if time itself is only a few thousand years old...and dinosaurs had weenie roasts with cave dudes...

[pangaia]

4. What's this about the Milky Way colliding with Andromeda?

Is this happening anytime soon? It's baseball season!

[jeff47]

10. Unfortunately, it's going to happen before the Cubs win. (nt)

[Jackpine Radical]

5. My theory is that the parent galaxy ejected them

because they were all Teabagger assholes.

The original clusterfuck.

[Squinch]

6. I'm going to carry an umbrella just in case.

[FiveGoodMen]

7. Wan-To had something to do with it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_at_the_End_of_Time

A story in which plasma beings living within stars go to war and one system gets flung away at such relativistic speed that the system's inhabitants live to see most of the other stars go out.

[lordsummerisle]

8. Sensationalistic much? n/t

[global1]

9. Consider This A Warning Shot.....

God is pissed at us for messing up the Earth - his creation. We need to take better care of this planet or next time we won't be so lucky.

[longship]

11. Horrible reportage.

It's not heading our way. M87 is freaking 53.5 million light years from the Milky Way. It's not like it's in the neighborhood.

The reporter does not describe what's really happening here or how it might be interesting.

Shannon Hall described this on Universe Today.

There are a few single stars we’ve discovered that break the stellar speed limit, and they are known as hypervelocity stars. But today astronomers multiplied the number of these ‘runaway’ stars by hundreds of thousands. The Virgo Cluster galaxy, M87, has ejected an entire star cluster, throwing it toward us at more than two million miles per hour.

“Astronomers have found runaway stars before, but this is the first time we’ve found a runaway star cluster,” said lead author Nelson Caldwell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in a press release.

About one in a billion stars travel at a speed roughly 3 times greater than our Sun (which clocks in at 220 km/s with respect to the galactic center). At a speed that fast, these stars can easily escape the galaxy entirely, traveling rapidly throughout intergalactic space. We have discovered dozens of these so-called hypervelocity stars.

But this is the first time an entire star cluster has broken free.

What would cause an entire cluster — hundreds of thousands of stars packed together a million times more closely than in the neighborhood of our Sun — to reach such a tremendous speed?

(More at link)

Get the real story there.

[MannyGoldstein]

12. It was an enemy of the Clintons

Let it serve as a warning to all.