Credit: Image generated by the editorial team using AI for illustrative purposes.

Chinese astronomers report the discovery of DESI-HVS1, which may be an old metal-poor hypervelocity star of galactic center origin. The finding, based on the data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and ESA's Gaia satellite, was detailed in a research paper published April 23 on the arXiv pre-print server.

What are hypervelocity stars and where to find them?

Hypervelocity stars (HVSs) have substantially higher velocities (usually exceeding 500 km/s) than the rest of the stellar population of a galaxy, which allows them to even escape their host galaxies. They are usually produced by the so-called Hills mechanism when a binary system is disrupted by a supermassive black hole (SMBH) in the center of a galaxy.

Given that the galactic center , with its SMBH's strong gravitational potential, is one of the most dynamically extreme environments in the Milky Way, it produces frequent dynamical interactions.…