Hypervelocity stars in the Milky Way

Hypervelocity stars in the Milky Way
In 2005 astronomer Warren Brown and his colleagues were studying the speeds of various stars in the Milky Way, hoping to attain a precise measurement of the galaxy's mass. Then they found a stellar oddball, a star moving away from Earth at 2 million miles per hour. No star should be able to move that fast. Astronomers suspect that these "hypervelocity stars" get flung from the galaxy by the supermassive black hole at its center.

Interesting reading:
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/article/69/6/10.1063/PT.3.3199

Image:
The galactic center in the IR. This photograph, taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, spans 890 × 640 light-years in the heart of the Milky Way and is centered on the innermost star cluster—the bright spot that surrounds the galaxy’s supermassive black hole. In this false-color picture, old, cool stars are blue, and dust features are lit up in red by hot, massive stars. The plane of the galaxy’s flat disk is apparent as the main, horizontal band of clouds.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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