It seems that there are about 10 hypervelocity stars detected speeding away form our own Milky Way Galaxy. One of these stars, HE 0437-5439, has been analyzed and found to be too young to have been ejected from our galaxy. So, where did it come from? It appears likely that it was part of a pair that got ejected from one of our neighboring galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). What did the ejecting? It’s a likely scenario that the pair came close to a black hole, which whipped the pair around, consuming one and ejecting the other out of the galaxy at high speed. If so, this would be the first observational evidence of a black hole at the center of the LMC, a close-by galaxy with a known metallicity that is estimated to be about 40% that of our own galaxy.

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