I’m always looking for new ideas in astronomy and science for a new story. The most interesting one I’ve run across is the quasi-moons that follow Earth’s orbit around the sun. There are several of these masses that range from 50 meters in diameter to a few miles. If we ignore the hype they are really asteroids following our orbit around the sun.
This week there have been a number of stories about an object in the Milky Way traveling at 1.3 million miles per hour. To put that in perspective, if you were traveling to the moon at that speed it would take 11 minutes. That’s shorter than almost all commuter times to work. A trip to the sun would take about 3 days, and a trip to Mars would be about four and a half days.
So what is this object and why is it significant. Scientists believe that it is likely a brown star that was kicked out trajectory by a supernova. Size-wise it is much smaller than our sun, but bigger than our planet, if the scientists are correct. As a science fiction junkie I’d be inclined to think of it’s as a very large planet that has a huge basement (or infrastructure) to house an entire civilization. It is currently moving in a path that would take it out of our galaxy.
Why is it significant? Objects traveling this fast 0.1% of the speed of light have been hypothesized, but this is the first evidence of such speeds being documented.
Will I use this in a future story? Well, in reality I have used the concept of such speeds and greater with the crazy sister of Ryder in the Orion’s Spur series, but most especially in the last book, Paragon’s Virtue. Will I use it in any upcoming stories? In Salt of the Earth it is a factor. Even though Salt of the Earth is confined to our Solar System the protagonists do discover an element that enables them to approach such speeds in the Solar System. Glad to see its possible. For galactic tales speeds even greater are necessary.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/rare-hypervelocity-star-may-able-191548544.html