Hot, young and with a need for speed: Fourteen wild stars have been caught racing through space. Spotted accidentally by the Hubble Space Telescope, which is operated out of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) at Hopkins, the stars leave long glowing tails in the dense gas they pass through.
What made these stars run away at speeds greater than 112,000 miles (180,000 kilometers) per hour? There are two possible scenarios. In the first, the star was originally part of a binary system (where two stars are in orbit around one another) when one of the stars exploded in a supernova, violently ejecting the other one out.
The other scenario is a collision between stars and/or star clusters that give the potentially renegade star extra energy needed to speed off. More studies are planned for scientists to understand exactly what the story is behind these lucky discoveries.
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