Most familiar stars peacefully orbit the center of the Milky Way. But citizen scientists working on NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project have helped discover an object moving so fast that it will escape the Milky Way’s gravity and shoot into intergalactic space. This hypervelocity object is the first such object found with the mass similar to or […]
The idea of a black hole binary system just flinging stellar-mass objects around like children’s toys is just a teensy bit terrifying, I must admit.