Friday, January 09, 2009

Wandering Stars

Liked this story today.

NASA identify wandering stars

Ripples in cosmic gas that resemble speedboat wakes have revealed a new population of young, renegade stars barreling through the universe at more than 112,000 miles (180,250 kilometers) an hour.

The stars appear to be just a few million years old and a few times larger than the sun.

As they careen through the cosmos, the stars' winds slam against nearby gas, creating enormous bow shocks billions or even a trillion miles wide.

So far astronomers have found 14 of these rogue stars using images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

But study leader Raghvendra Sahai, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, thinks the stellar interlopers will turn out to be common in the universe. 

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