14 DAY TRIAL // There is no easy way to say this! Scientists recently found that extrasolar planets leaving the galaxy can travel at speed of up to 30 million miles (48.2 million kilometers) per hour. This means that only subatomic particles leave the Milky Way at higher speeds.
These extreme velocities were unexpected. In 2005, researchers discovered stars being ejected from the galaxy at a speed of around 1.5 million miles (2.4 million kilometers) per hour, and thought that was fast. I guess they'll have to rethink that now.
“These warp-speed planets would be some of the fastest objects in our Galaxy. If you lived on one of them, you'd be in for a wild ride from the center of the galaxy to the Universe at large,” CfA investigator Avi Loeb explains. The fast-moving objects are called hypervelocity planets.
Astrophysicists suspect that these objects are sent on their merry way after the binary systems in which they originally form meet the intense gravitational pull of a black hole. The ensuing tidal interactions cast one of the planets far away, at enormous speeds.