Star seen hurtling out of Milky Way’s black hole at 4,000,000 miles per hour

A black hole is an object so compact -- usually a collapsed star -- that nothing can escape its gravitational pull. Not even light. In this image, we can see a black hole, but only because it is surrounded by a superheated disc of material, an accretion disc.
The star was seen hurtling away from the black hole (Getty)

The gravity of a black hole is so powerful that even light can’t escape its clutches - hence the name ‘black hole’.

But scientists just spotted something odd - a star hurtling away from the central black hole in our own Milky Way galaxy.

The runaway star, S5-HVS1, is moving at ‘extreme’ speeds of up to four million miles per hour - and appears to have been ‘kicked out’ of the area near the supermassive black hole.

The black hole, known as Sagittarius A* is thought to pull in stars, gas clouds and planets, devouring them with its huge gravity.

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The scientists, whose paper is on the preprint server Arxiv speculate that it might have been part of a binary system which interacted with Sagittarius A*.

The paper is called ‘The Great Escape: Discovery of a nearby 1700 km/s star ejected from the Milky Way by Sgr A*’.

Supermassive black holes are common in the centers of galaxies and may generate the most energetic phenomena in the known universe.

The researchers write, ‘When integrated backwards in time, the orbit of the star points unambiguously to the Galactic Centre, implying that S5-HVS1 was kicked away from Sgr A* with a velocity of ∼1800 km/s.

‘The ejection trajectory and transit time of S5-HVS1 coincide with the orbital plane and age of the annular disk of young stars at the Galactic centre, and thus may be linked to its formation.

‘With the S5-HVS1 ejection velocity being almost twice the velocity of other hyper-velocity stars previously associated with the Galactic Centre, we question whether they have been generated by the same mechanism or whether the ejection velocity distribution has been constant over time.’

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