This is a race across our galaxy at full speed

When you're flying at a million miles per hour, it can turn heads, and that's exactly what happened with this runaway star. Snappily's name is J1249+36, and it's moving fast enough to break free from our galaxy's gravity and launch into intergalactic space. Newsweek Reports. The question is what propelled J1249+36 so powerfully that it is flying three times faster than the sun and 1,500 times faster than sound. Space.com website One theory holds that J1249+36 once played the role of a binary companion to a “dead” white dwarf — a former Sun-like star that had exhausted its hydrogen supply, but in this case, fed on its companion and absorbed mass until it exploded (see video).

The hope now is to tease apart the star's elemental composition and find out whether it was “polluted” by a white dwarf explosion, or whether it originated in a globular cluster that likely hosts black holes. Such “hypervelocity” stars are not rare, but rather old Smithsonian The article estimates that roughly 1,000 stars are wandering around our galaxy, but this story contains two more great pieces of news: J1249+36 belongs to a class of the oldest stars in the galaxy called dwarf stars, the article estimates. Teach dailyThe volunteer scientists who found it were combing data for evidence of the mysterious “Planet 9”. (Planet 9 may not be a planet.)