Superfast stars - a source of knowledge about other galaxies and a possible carrier of life

Cosmologists have discovered a new way to obtain information about distant regions of space and a new opportunity to "infect" the life of the planets. Abraham Loeb and James Guillochon from Harvard University have studied bullet stars traveling through space at speeds of about half the speed of light. Such stars are launched into intergalactic space by binary systems from black holes, which are obtained in the collisions of galaxies.

Usually, the properties of distant objects of astrophysics can be studied only on the basis of radiation that has come down to us or particles that have flown by - which, naturally, can get to us from the source only in a straight line (not counting the small possible deviation due to the gravitational action). However, there are another carriers of information in the universe that can be accessible to a tenacious human gaze armed with appropriate technology. Stray, superfast stars are not even required to fly into our area of ​​the galaxy - we receive their radiation and can study them and draw conclusions from it.

Stars in a galaxy usually travel at speeds of the order of several hundred kilometers per second relative to their neighbors. But in 1988, astronomer Jack Hills predicted that the impact of a gravitational "sling" could accelerate a star to thousands of kilometers per second. At such speeds, the star is already able to leave the galaxy and go on a long journey beyond it. Even within our galaxy there are a couple of dozens of stars leaving it at enormous speeds - apparently, even one black hole in the center of the Milky Way was able to disperse them like that.
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Loeb and Guillochon have calculated that binary systems from black holes of colliding galaxies can accelerate stars to relativistic velocities of the order of one third of or more. On the scale of the universe, collisions should be commonplace, so space can be filled with such superfast travelers — on the order of one hundred thousand per cubic gigaparsec. Scientists hope that the next generation of telescopes will be able to detect and study such stars. In addition, such stars can carry away small cosmic bodies, which can serve as carriers of life between galaxies.