{"id":228199,"date":"2026-01-02T01:07:42","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T07:07:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/finding-runaway-stars-to-help-map-dark-matter-in-the-milky-way"},"modified":"2026-01-02T01:07:42","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T07:07:42","slug":"finding-runaway-stars-to-help-map-dark-matter-in-the-milky-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/finding-runaway-stars-to-help-map-dark-matter-in-the-milky-way","title":{"rendered":"Finding runaway stars to help map dark matter in the Milky Way"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/finding-runaway-stars-to-help-map-dark-matter-in-the-milky-way.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Hypervelocity stars have, since the 1920s, been an important tool that allows astronomers to study the properties of the Milky Way galaxy, such as its gravitational potential and the distribution of matter. Now astronomers from China have made a large-volume search for hypervelocity stars by utilizing a special class of stars known for their distinct, regular, predictable pulsation behavior that makes them useful as distance indicators.<\/p>\n<p>Their research is <a href=\"https:\/\/iopscience.iop.org\/article\/10.3847\/1538-4357\/ae0c09\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in The Astrophysical Journal.<\/p>\n<p>The escape velocity of any planet, star or galaxy is the velocity required for a mass, leaving the object\u2019s surface, to coast completely and exactly out of the planet\u2019s gravitational well, going to infinity. Earth\u2019s escape velocity is 11.2 kilometers per second (km\/s).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hypervelocity stars have, since the 1920s, been an important tool that allows astronomers to study the properties of the Milky Way galaxy, such as its gravitational potential and the distribution of matter. Now astronomers from China have made a large-volume search for hypervelocity stars by utilizing a special class of stars known for their distinct, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}