September 06, 2005
P'tooey!

That's one helluva spitball:

Astronomers have spotted the fastest moving stellar corpse to date – and it appears to be headed straight out of our galaxy.

A team from the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Socorro, New Mexico, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, clocked the dead star at 1100 kilometres per second.

The object, called B1508+55, is a rotating neutron star, or pulsar. It is the superdense core of a massive star that exploded as a supernova about 2.5 million years ago.

The discovery is important because at this time astronomers don't have a computer model that predicts this sort of object can be ejected during a supernova with this much force. Back to the drawing boards with you!

Posted by scott at September 06, 2005 12:53 PM

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