A Successful Targeted Search for Hypervelocity Stars

Warren R. Brown, Margaret J. Geller, Scott J. Kenyon, Michael J. Kurtz

Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, 60 Garden St, Cambridge, MA 02138

Paper: ApJ Letters, Jan 2006, submitted

EPrint Server: astro-ph/0601580


Abstract:

Hypervelocity stars (HVSs) travel with velocities so extreme that dynamical ejection from a massive black hole is their only suggested origin. Following the discovery of the first HVS by Brown and collaborators, we have undertaken a dedicated survey for more HVSs in the Galactic halo and present here the resulting discovery of two new HVSs: SDSS J091301.0+305120 and SDSS J091759.5+672238, traveling with Galactic rest-frame velocities at least +558+/-12 and +638+/-12 km s-1, respectively. Assuming the HVSs are B8 main sequence stars, they are at distances 75 and 55 kpc, respectively, and have travel times from the Galactic Center consistent with their lifetimes. The existence of two B8 HVSs in our 1900 deg2 survey, combined with the Yu & Tremaine HVS rate estimates, is consistent with HVSs drawn from a standard initial mass function but inconsistent with HVS drawn from a truncated mass function like the one in the top-heavy Arches cluster. The travel times of the five currently known HVSs provide no evidence for a burst of HVSs from a major in-fall event at the Galactic Center in the last 160 Myr.


Preprints available from the authors at wbrown@cfa.harvard.edu , or the raw TeX (no figures) if you click here.

Back to the gcnews home-page.