First pair of hyper-velocity binary stars discovered!

PB3877 was first identified by researchers using data from the Sloan Digital Sky-Survey (SDSS) data in 2011, but back then, they thought it was a single star. Now, thanks to new observations made with the 10-metre Keck II telescope in Hawaii and the 8.2-metre Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, the team in Germany was able to confirm that it was both a hyper-velocity star, and a binary system.

It appears to consist of one super-hot star that's more than five times hotter than our Sun, and a companion that's 1,000 degrees cooler than our Sun.

"When we looked at the new data, much to our surprise, we found weak absorption lines that could not come from the hot star," says astronomer Thomas Kupfer from the California Institute of Technology. "The cool companion, just like the hot primary, shows a high radial velocity. Hence, the two stars form a binary system, which is the first hyper-velocity wide binary candidate."

They also managed to map out its path to determine that it could not have originated from the centre of the Milky Way. This means it cannot have been accelerated by a supermassive black hole.

http://www.sciencealert.com/astronom...physics-models