NASA astronomers find the fastest exoplanet system at 1.2 million miles per hour

The blistering system could be traveling at just under the Milky Way's escape velocity.

by Jordan Strickler
February 18, 2025
Reading Time: 5 mins read
Edited and reviewed by Mihai Andrei

NASA scientists have detected a star and trailing exoplanet that may be sailing through the Milky Way with unprecedented speed. The star-and-planet duo, if confirmed, would set a record for the fastest-known exoplanet system – moving, by one estimate, at a blistering 1.2 million miles per hour, nearly double our solar system’s speed.

Exoplanet goes whoosh!

The system burst onto astronomers’ radar in 2011 when the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) project first spotted light signatures that hinted at two objects crossing paths with a background star’s light. Now, after analyzing archival data and turning to the telescopes of Keck Observatory in Hawaii and ESA’s Gaia satellite, a team led of astronomers believes they’ve pinned down the system’s true identity.

The team is led by Sean Terry, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland, College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and the study was published in The Astronomical Journal.

“We think this is a so-called super-Neptune world orbiting a low-mass star at a distance that would lie between the orbits of Venus and Earth if it were in our solar system,” Terry said. “If so, it will be the first planet ever found orbiting a hypervelocity star.”

A super-Neptune is essentially a planet larger and more massive than our familiar Neptune, but smaller than a gas giant like Jupiter.

More:
https://www.zmescience.com/space/nasa-astronomers-find-the-fastest-exoplanet-system-at-1-2-million-miles-per-hour/