WTF !!! Catch a Speeding Star: High-Velocity Milky Way Objects Tracked (Animation)

The six stars trailed by yellow lines are hypervelocity stars, which means that they move at hundreds of kilometers per second (which is hundreds of thousands of miles per hour). These stars are moving much faster than most stars in the galaxy, and were likely accelerated by interacting with the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, a statement from the ESA said.

"These hypervelocity stars are extremely important to study the overall structure of our Milky Way," Elena Maria Rossi a professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who presented Gaia's discovery of these six stars at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science in June, said in the statement.

Scientists can use the trajectory of these stars to characterize the gravitational field of the galaxy, from its center to the outer edges, as well as the possible effects of dark matter. One star, labeled No. 1 in the video, is moving so fast — more than 500 km/s or more than 1 billion mph — that the ESA thinks the object might someday break through the gravitational field and leave the galaxy.