times faster than the Sun's orbital velocity around the galaxy's center, and also faster than the galaxy's escape velocity. The star is about 200,000 light years from the galaxy's center. Some doubt has surrounded the previous studies based on the speed and position of HE 0437-5439. The star would have to be at least 100 million years old to have traveled that distance from the galactic core, yet its mass and blue color indicate that it had burned only for 20 million years. These observations led to the explanation that it was part of a triple-star system consisting of two closely bound stars and one outer star. The black hole pulled the outer star away, which granted the star's momentum to the tight binary system and boosted both stars to escape velocity from the galaxy. As the stars traveled away, they went into normal stellar evolution, with one of them becoming a red giant and engulfing the other and forming one giant star — a blue straggler. In 2008, a team of astronomers found a match between the star's chemical composition and the characteristics of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Support that the star originated in the LMC was strengthened because the star is only 65,000 light years away from the nearby galaxy. Later observations using the Hubble Space Telescope showed that the star originated from the Milky Way's galactic center. See also Intergalactic stars Stellar kinematics Blue straggler References External links HE 0437-5439 on NASA Two short video clips on the HE 0437-5439 hypervelocity star LectureMaker film crew produces an introduction and an interview with Dr. Warren R. Brown B-type main-sequence stars Blue stragglers Dorado (constellation) Extragalactic stars Intergalactic stars Hypervelocity stars ?