Astrophysics, abstract
astro-ph/0612673

From: Alessia Gualandris [view email]

Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2006 10:04:08 GMT (51kb)

A hypervelocity star from the Large Magellanic Cloud

Authors: Alessia Gualandris, Simon Portegies Zwart

Comments: 6 pages, 5 figures, MNRAS Letters, in press

We study the acceleration of the star HE0437-5439, to hypervelocity and discuss its possible origin in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The star has a radial velocity of 723 km/s and is located at a distance of 61 kpc from the Sun. With a mass of about 8 Msun, the travel time from the Galactic centre is of about 100 Myr, much longer than its main sequence lifetime. Given the relatively small distance to the LMC (18 kpc), we consider it likely that HE0437-5439 originated in the cloud rather than in the Galactic centre, like the other hypervelocity stars. The minimum ejection velocity required to travel from the LMC to its current location within its lifetime is of about 500 kms. Such a high velocity can only be obtained in a dynamical encounter with a massive black hole. We perform 3-body scattering simulations in which a stellar binary encounters a massive black hole and find that a black hole more massive than 1000 Msun is necessary to explain the high velocity of HE0437-5439. We argue that the most likely birth place for HE0437-5439 in the LMC is the star cluster NGC 330, which is young enough to host stars coeval to HE0437-5439, and dense enough to produce an intermediate mass black hole able to eject an 8 Msun star with hypervelocity.

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0612673