Runaway planet found orbiting ultra-fast star for first time – it’s flying through Milky Way 4X faster than lightning ASTRONOMERS may have just found the fastest exoplanet system in the galaxy - a super-Neptune world orbiting a hypervelocity star.
"To be certain the newly identified star is part of the system that caused the 2011 signal, we'd like to look again in another year and see if it moves the right amount and in the right direction to confirm it came from the point where we detected the signal," said David Bennett, a senior research scientist at Nasa and co-author, who led the original study in 2011.
"We think this is a so-called super-Neptune world orbiting a low-mass star at a distance that would lie between the orbits of Venus and Earth if it were in our solar system," explained Nasa researcher, Sean Terry, who led the study.
A hypervelocity star is an ultra-fast star that researchers believe has brushed past the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
Though they could be moving much faster, at speeds that could one day launch them through the galaxy and into deep-space, according to a new study, published in The Astronomical Journal.
