http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=5&ObjectID=10010240
:WASHINGTON - An outcast star is zooming out of the Milky Way, the first ever seen escaping the
:galaxy, astronomers reported on Tuesday.
:
:The star is heading for the emptiness of intergalactic space after being ejected from the heart of the
:Milky Way following a close encounter with a black hole, said Warren Brown, an astronomer at the
:Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
:
:The outcast is going so fast -- over 2.4 million km/h -- that astronomers believe it was lobbed out of
:the galaxy by the tremendous force of a black hole thought to sit at the Milky Way's centre. That speed
:is about twice the velocity needed to escape the galaxy's grip, Brown said by telephone.
:
:"We have never before seen a star moving fast enough to completely escape the confines of our
:galaxy," he said. "We're tempted to call it the outcast star because it was forcefully tossed from its
:home."
The first thing I thought of when I saw this was the final terminal on Rubicon. Of course, this can't be the same star, since the rogue star that the UESC Salinger orbits travels around the galactic centre. Which then of course makes me wonder how such a star could be able to orbit the galactic centre outside the plane of the Milky Way, given the tremendous force needed...
:At this point, the outcast is about 180,000 light-years from Earth, in an outer region of the galaxy
:known as the halo. A light-year is about 10 trillion km, the distance light travels in a year.
Huh-huh. They said "Halo".
