نزدیک‌ترین ستاره فوق‌سریع به زمين کشف شد : آيا اسرار ماده تاریک فاش خواهد شد ؟

Zoom! A star was recently spotted speeding at 1.4 million miles an hour (2.2 million km/hr), which happened to be the closest and second-brightest of the so-called “hypervelocity” stars found so far.

Now that about 20 of these objects have been found, however, astronomers are now trying to use the stars beyond classifying them. One of those ways could be probing the nature of dark matter, the mysterious substance thought to bind together much of the universe.

LAMOST-HVS1 (as the object is called, after the Chinese Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope that discovered it) is about three times faster than most other stars found. It’s in a cluster of similar hypervelocity stars above the Milky Way’s disk and from its motion, scientists suspect it actually came from our galaxy’s center.

What’s interesting about the star, besides its pure speed, is it is travelling in a “dark matter” halo surrounding our galaxies, the astronomers said.

“The hypervelocity star tells us a lot about our galaxy – especially its center and the dark matter halo,” stated Zheng Zheng, an astronomy researcher at the University of Utah who led the study.

“We can’t see the dark matter halo, but its gravity acts on the star. We gain insight from the star’s trajectory and velocity, which are affected by gravity from different parts of our galaxy.”