14 DAY TRIAL // In what might be the worst breakup ever (sorry, Adele, some have it way worse than you), a galaxy has thrown out a star cluster at a speed of over 2 million miles per hour.
In case anyone was wondering (and I am sure many of you were), that's about 3,218,688 kilometers per hour.
It's unclear why the galaxy threw such a fit, but rumor has it that the star cluster was out the door so fast it did not even get to say goodbye or pet the family cat one last time.
Joking aside, the galaxy in question is called M87, and the cluster it has parted with is now referred to as HVGC-1, which stands for hypervelocity globular cluster, Science News reports.
According to the same source, globular clusters such as HCGC-1 are basically groups of thousands of stars that are so close to one another that they resemble a ginormous ball measuring “merely” a few dozen light-years across.
Although astronomers are no strangers to runaway stars, it appears that having an entire cluster be thrown out of its galaxy is a fairly unique phenomenon.
“Astronomers have found runaway stars before, but this is the first time we've found a runaway star cluster,” explains Nelson Caldwell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.