Ripples in cosmic gas that resemble speedboat wakes have revealed a new population of young, renegade stars barreling through the universe at more than 112,000 miles (180,250 kilometers) an hour.
As they careen through the cosmos, the stars' winds slam against nearby gas, creating enormous bow shocks billions or even a trillion miles wide.
So far astronomers have found 14 of these rogue stars using images from the
Hubble Space Telescope. But study leader Raghvendra Sahai, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, thinks the stellar interlopers will turn out to be common in the universe.
The stars may be the ousted members of two-star systems that were ejected when their partners exploded as supernovae.
It's also possible that a binary star system would collide with another binary set or a single star and the interaction would fling one of the stars into space. In either scenario, the ousted stars go shooting away to follow their own unique paths, Sahai said.
"We think the massive runaway stars observed before were just the tip of the iceberg," Sahai said in a statement.
