http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/escaping_star_050208.html "Having lost its companion in a close brush our Milky Way's supermassive black hole, a fast-moving star appears to have had enough. It's fleeing the galaxy." "It is travelling at twice the speed needed to escape the gravitational clutches of the galaxy. About 80 million or 100 million years from now, Brown said, the star will exit the galaxy and become a lone wanderer of intergalactic space." Very cool. I hope that Sol don't acquire also an interest for runaway the galaxy. It must very scary a night without stars!
Yep. What a view though for any inhabitants of the system during the time frame it exited the galaxy but was still near enough to fill the sky!
Could it crash somewhere? Like on earth...! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Ahhh! We are dooomed!! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Stellar collisions are so unlikely that the odds are against it ever having happened in our galaxy's history (except maybe in the crowded core regions, or inside globular clusters).
Is it possible that this star originally came from the Sagittarius galaxy currently being swallowed up by the Milky Way galaxy?
You ought to be able to back track its course to figure that out. It may be though that the source, the black hole, is moving around so much that you cannot be sure.
If the star in question has had a close encounter with the core of the Milky way and been slingshotted out fast enough to escape the galaxy altogether, it seems improbable that it originated from another galaxy which is only now merging into the periphary of the Milky Way. Stars from that doomed Sagittarius dwarf wouldn't have yet had time to zom right into the center of our, much larger, galaxy.
Maddad, its looks like that the star passed through the region of galactic center, so as Starthane suggested, we can rule out that the star is from Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy.
Yeah, but we'd have to first rule out that the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy wasn't near the galactic center Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
The relative motion of the Sagittarius dwarf to the Milky Way is shown in this link: http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/sag-deg.htm ...highly inclined to our galactic plane and not interacting directly with the core. However, it would seem to be well within ou galactic halo (not shown on the graphic), so some might loosely define it as being part of the Milky Way already.
