A photo from open sources
Galaxy M87 has cast to honor anyone a baseball pitcher. She “threw out” an entire star cluster towards us, at a speed of over 3.3 million kilometers in hour. The newly discovered cluster (cluster of stars) was named HVGC-1, now with terrible speed, rushes to nowhere. Now he will constantly drift in an intergalactic vacuum. Earlier astronomers have already run away from their galaxies stars, however for the first time they witnessed how the whole a cluster of stars “escapes” from the galaxy. Nelson Caldwell (Nelson Caldwell), associate at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is the lead author of the study, which is preparing for publications in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. “HVGC” in the name HVGC-1 stands for “hypervelocity globular cluster” – hyper speed ball cluster. Globular clusters usually contain thousands of stars collected in a ball, the diameter of which is several tens of light years. In the Milky Way Galaxy, there are about 150 globular clusters. For comparison, in a giant elliptical Galaxy M87, there are thousands of such clusters. HVGC-1 Discovery – Happy an accident. Scientists have been researching for many years spaces around the M87. Initially, they sorted objects by color, to separate stars and galaxies from globular clusters. Then they used the Hectospec instrument at the MMT telescope in Arizona, to explore globular clusters in detail. A computer automatically analyzed the data and counted the speed of each a cluster. Any deviations were investigated manually. Most of deviations were associated with crashes in the program, however surprisingly high speed HVGC-1 was confirmed. Astronomers believe that one of the reasons this congestion got so big acceleration, it may be that in the center of the galaxy M87 is a couple supermassive black holes. Star cluster approached on too far distance to them. Many stars that were close to its outer borders, a dense core was lost however left untouched. HVGC-1 moves so fast that it is completely can “escape” from the M87. Scientists suggest that it could already leave the galaxy.
Galaxies
