Tuesday, November 18, 2025

How Three Runaway Stars Solved A Galactic Mystery

Image of HVS 3, one the stars used in the study, against a stellar backdrop. Credit - NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

All motion is relative. That simple fact makes tracking the motion of distant objects outside our galaxy particularly challenging. For example, there has been a debate among astronomers for decades about the path that one of our nearest neighbors, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), took over the last few billion years. A new paper from Scott Lucchini and Jiwon Jesse Hand from the Harvard Center for Astrophysics grapples with that question by using a unique technique - the paths of hypervelocity stars.



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