Cosmic cannonball grabs NASA Chandra telescope's eye

NASA said today its Chandra X-ray Observatory grabbed a picture of a star screaming out of the galaxy at 3 million miles per hour.

At this rate, the star, called RX J0822-4300, is destined to escape from the Milky Way after millions of years, even though it has only traveled about 20 light years so far.

"This star is moving at 3 million miles an hour, but it's so far away that the apparent motion we see in five years is less than the height of the numerals in the date on a penny, seen from the length of a football field," said Frank Winkler of Middlebury College in Vermont in a statement.

"Just after it was born, this neutron star got a one-way ticket out of the Galaxy," said co-author Robert Petre of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Astronomers have seen other stars being flung out of the Milky Way, but few as fast as this."So-called hypervelocity stars have been previously discovered shooting out of the Milky Way with speeds around one million miles per hour. One key difference between RX J0822-4300 and these other reported galactic escapees is the source of their speed.

The hypervelocity stars are thought to have been ejected by interactions with the supermassive black hole in the Galaxy's center. NASA said the results from this study suggest the supernova explosion was lop-sided, kicking the neutron star in one direction and much of the debris from the explosion in the other. According to NASA, the Chandra X-ray Observatory is the world's most powerful X-ray telescope. It has eight-times greater resolution and is able to detect sources more than 20-times fainter than any previous X-ray telescope.