This star cluster is headed our way at 2 million miles per hour
This artist’s illustration shows the star cluster HVGC-1 being “thrown” from the supergiant elliptical galaxy M87.
A distant galaxy has thrown Earth a curveball, tossing an entire star cluster our way at 2 million miles per hour.
But don't worry.
It's not expected to get here. Like, ever.
Instead, this newly-discovered star cluster is on a fast journey to nowhere, destined to float through the space between galaxies for the rest of time, according to new research set to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
The discovery is a first for scientists.
"Astronomers have found runaway stars before, but this is the first time we've found a runaway star cluster," said Nelson Caldwell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the study's lead author.
The runaway star cluster HVGC-1 (circled) in a photo from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
The cluster, known as HVGC-1, originated in the M87 galaxy and contains thousands of stars inside a "ball" a few dozen light-years across.
The M87 galaxy holds thousands of these star clusters.
The monstrous elliptical galaxy M87 is home to several trillion stars, a supermassive black hole and a family of 15,000 globular star clusters. (NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team)
Astronomers aren't sure just how HVGC-1 got ejected at such a high speed, but believe it may have passed through M87's two supermassive black holes, which would have acted like slingshots.
"We didn't expect to find anything moving that fast," said study co-author Jay Strader of Michigan State University.
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