The phenomena that cross the blackness of the sky have become an enigma for man who has observed them since ancient times. In the Renaissance, science had a huge awakening, however, technology still did not allow us to understand what the fleeting lights that crossed the sky were. Then they were named shooting stars and were attributed a bad omen, although later the vision changed and they were considered good luck charms.
Today we know that the flashing lights in the sky are nothing more than tiny cosmic dust that crosses the Earth. The speed at which they enter is so great that due to friction they catch fire, forming the linear glowing lights that we see in the sky.
Although the idea that these were stars traveling at high speed through space was discarded, today astrophysicists say that it is possible that they do exist and we are not talking about meteors that cross the atmosphere.
real shooting stars
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s monumental observing program using the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory found a new type of stars that had not been detected before. These fit perfectly into the description of a shooting star, that is, they are stars that move at such incredible speeds that they are able to escape the gravity of their parent galaxies. They are called hypervelocity stars and their origin is really interesting.
The idea that stars of this type existed is not as recent as their discovery. Already in the 1980s, theorist Jack Gilbert Hills of Los Alamos National Labs imagined what would happen if a binary system traveled near the supermassive hole, which we know lives in the very heart of the planet.
Binary systems are characterized by uniting the fate of two stars that rotate around each other and are trapped by their gravitational fields, that is, they orbit a common center of mass. Hills raised the question of what would happen if this system crossed at a suitable distance through Sagitarius A*, neither so close to be devoured, nor so far as to not interact with its gravitational field.
hyperspeed stars
By calculating the tidal force, Hills realized that the gravitational field could split the binary system in two. What would happen next would be something similar to what happens if two skaters holding hands start spinning at an exaggeratedly fast speed; They end up giving in to the force and are thrown away from each other.
Something similar would happen with the binary system that, as it approached the supermassive hole, would end up separating its stars. In such an encounter, a star could gain enough strength to fly completely out of its galaxy.
Hills’ theory was only one for a long time, until now that observations with telescopes have shown that shooting stars traveling at dizzying speeds through the Universe are real. But instead of bringing answers to astrophysicists, endless questions have been raised about shooting stars.
Researchers are now trying to track down stars of this type and wonder if there are any orbiting them. In which case, such a discovery would forever change the way we conceive of the birth of planets.