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A MÉNAGE A TROIS turned ugly, an innocent victim and a fugitive fleeing the scene: this all helped to unravel how a superfast star got its speed.
One of just a few known runaway stars, the Becklin-Neugebauer (BN) object is fleeing the centre of the Orion nebula at 30 kilometres per second, and no one knows why. A popular theory is a past interaction with a nearby massive protostar.
But Jonathan Tan and Sourav Chatterjee of the University of Florida in Gainesville suggest an alternative idea. They think the runaway BN object invaded a tight embrace between a pair of stars in Orion, known as theta-1C, creating an unstable threesome. This ejected the star of lowest mass – the BN object. The researchers simulated all possible outcomes of such a threesome: in some cases, the BN object fled at 30 kilometres per second. Next, they calculated seven properties of the simulated, leftover binary system, and found that they matched theta-1C (arxiv.org/abs/1203.0325v3).
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Tan presented the results at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.
