A hundred million years ago, a triple-star system was traveling through the bustling center of our Milky Way galaxy when it made a wrong turn. The trio wandered too close to the galaxy's giant black hole, which ate one of the stars and hurled the other two out of the Milky Way. This story may sound like a fairy tale, but astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope say it is the most likely scenario for a so-called hypervelocity star known as HE 0437-5439, one of the fastest ever detected. It's blazing across space at a speed of 1.6 million miles an hour and is cruising high above the galaxy's disk, about 200,000 light-years from the center. For comparison, the Milky Way's disk is approximately 100,000 light-years in diameter.
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