British astronomers have established the origin of the wandering stars - the fastest stars in the Milky Way. The corresponding study was published in the Monthly Notices of Royal Astronomical Society, briefly reported by the University of Cambridge (UK).
Scientists believe that the fastest (hyperspeed) stars entered the Milky Way from the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud. The luminaries, as the authors believe, were previously part of binary systems, one component of which exploded as a supernova.
The authors came to similar conclusions using data from the SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) survey. Experts note that most of the hyperspeed stars are observed in the constellations Sextant and Leo. The simulation showed that more than 10 thousand luminaries were ejected from the Large Magellanic Cloud, half of which have left or will leave the Milky Way.
There are currently about 20 known hypervelocity stars in the Galaxy. Their speed, as the study showed, is the sum of the speed of the Large Magellanic Cloud and the speed that they acquired after the destruction of the companion star.