Hypervelocity star
Okay, so imagine you're playing a game of catch with a friend. You throw the ball and your friend catches it. But what if you threw the ball really, really hard - so hard that it flew right past your friend and into the neighbor's yard? That ball would be moving at a hypervelocity!
Now, let's think about stars. Stars are huge balls of gas that float around in space. Sometimes, stars can get hit by other objects in space (like other stars or black holes) and it can cause them to suddenly speed up and fly away from their original position really, really fast. When a star moves at a speed faster than 1 million miles per hour, that makes it a hypervelocity star!
Hypervelocity stars are pretty rare, because it takes a really powerful force to make them move that fast. Scientists think there might only be about 100 hypervelocity stars in our whole galaxy! But because they're moving so fast, hypervelocity stars can be really useful for studying things like the shape of our galaxy and the structure of space itself. So even though they're rare, they're pretty cool to learn about!
Now, let's think about stars. Stars are huge balls of gas that float around in space. Sometimes, stars can get hit by other objects in space (like other stars or black holes) and it can cause them to suddenly speed up and fly away from their original position really, really fast. When a star moves at a speed faster than 1 million miles per hour, that makes it a hypervelocity star!
Hypervelocity stars are pretty rare, because it takes a really powerful force to make them move that fast. Scientists think there might only be about 100 hypervelocity stars in our whole galaxy! But because they're moving so fast, hypervelocity stars can be really useful for studying things like the shape of our galaxy and the structure of space itself. So even though they're rare, they're pretty cool to learn about!
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