Cosmology Views

Fastest Star

Earth is safe from oncoming fast stars!

This story is both funny and comforting.

Funny:
This "hot subdwarf made mostly of helium" is "spinning rapidly" because it had been orbiting around the white dwarf which was causing the supernova explosion!
Somehow, this spinning helium star achieved a slingshot trajectory, by interacting with 2 other stars, without being ripped apart.
There is no sign of the supernova or the white dwarf.

I wonder if someone simulated this combination to verify it was plausible before the reporter got the story. :-)

Comforting:

This is the fastest star ever recorded. It gets big numbers in miles per hour.

At 1200 km/s, this is actually 4.21 E-3 ly/yr.

If our closest star, proxima centauri (it's the third star around the binary, alpha centauri, so it's a candidate for this 3-star slingshot scenario)  had this fastest velocity it would take about 1000 years to hit us.

I can rest peacefully knowing no star will hit us in the next 1000 years!

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