Shooting Stars

So buy know we should realize that What most people refer to as shooting stars are actually comets. So it may shock you to realize that there is something very similar to a shooting star that exists. When we think of a star it is good to think of it as revolving about the galaxies core as we do about our own sun. So it would be strange to think that a star could be shooting
off like a comet. However, just as planets, there do exist stars that can break away from their orbit in the galaxy. So, how do these come to be. There are two main resins for a star to be ejected from its orbit. One method would be for a supernova explosion to give off enough energy to knock the star out of orbit. The other way would be for two binary systems to interact and causing star(s) to be ejected from its orbit. These stars when ejected are given some extra energy, meaning that they are given some more velocity when they are ejected. In fact there are two sort of classes of these stars. First there are the high velocity stars which are observed to be moving at a speed of the order of 100 km/s.
Then there are what are know as the hypervelocity stars, these are the true shooting stars. Hypervelocity stars move with speed on the order of 1000 km/s. These stars however are quite rare. These stars are thought to originate in a way similar to the other high velocity stars(binary interactions), however, they are a little more interesting. rather than having two interacting binary systems causing the break, it is though that it is the systems interaction with a blackhole. When the binary system gets close to the black hole one of the stars are grabbed by the blackhole, while the other is ejected with a boost of extra velocity. All known hypervelocity stars are main sequence stars and smaller in mass than our sun. These things are so rare that there are only 16 known hypervelocity stars and only 1000 out of the 100 billion stars in the milky way are thought to be hypervelocity stars.


Above is an animation of how these stars are given their velocities. Notice the binary system com in in from the upper right. It will come close to the black hole at the center of the galaxy and undergo the process as described above.

An artists depiction of a hypervelocity star.