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Gaia space telescope discovers 55 'runaway' careening away from stellar cluster at 80 times the speed of sound

Live Science
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Astronomers have identified 55 runaway stars being ejected at high speeds from a young star cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

This is the first time so many stars have been seen escaping from a single star cluster.

The runaway stars were ejected in two bursts over the last two million years .

The findings increase the number of known runaway stars by a factor of 10 .

The LMC provides a good test because it is much farther away than the stars Gaia usually studies within our home galaxy.

" R136 has only just formed, 1.8 million years ago , and so the runaway stars could not yet be so far away that it becomes impossible to identify them," De Koter said.