Blog Post Image: Nearest Bright ‘Hypervelocity Star’ Found

Zheng Zheng, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Utah, led a team of American and Chinese scientists who discovered the closest bright hypervelocity star of 20 yet found. Scientists believe each hypervelocity star began as part of a binary pair of stars near the center of our Milky Way galaxy, where extreme gravity from a supermassive black hole sucked in one star in the pair and, like a bolo, simultaneously hurled the other star — a new hypervelocity star — toward the edge of the galaxy. Photo Credit: Lee J. Siegel, University of Utah