Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Runaway star zooms away from its nursery

massive runaway star has been spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope racing away from its stellar nursery after being kicked out by some of its much heftier stellar siblings. The homeless star is on the outer fringes of 30 Doradus Nebula — commonly known as the Tarantula Nebula — a teeming stellar breeding ground in the Milky Way's nearby galactic neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The star, which is about 90 times as massive as our own sun, is racing through space at a speed of about 250,000 mph (400,000 kilometers per hour), a speed that would get you to the moon and back in about two hours. The finding is yet more evidence that the most massive stars in the local universe can be found in the Tarantula Nebula, making it a unique laboratory for studying heavyweight stars. R136 is nestled inside the Tarantula Nebula, which is located 170,000 light-years from Earth and contains several stars topping 100 solar masses each.

It's incredible how many stars exsist in our universe. Discoveries like this can lead us to find many more discoveries leading to the birth of the universe. Stars are unimaginable in the size that they can be and it leads us to a major challenge just to comprehend their size. It's amazing how fast something that heavy can travel through space, while we can't reach speeds even close to that. If we could travel at speeds like that we could discover so much more than what we already have.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37089614/ns/technology_and_science-space/

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