Orion, the hunter, climbs majestically across the southern sky
this evening. The constellation is marked by a distinctive belt
of three bright stars. And south of the belt is the Orion
Nebula, a cloud of gas and dust that's given birth to thousands
of stars. Some of these stars have left the nest, so to speak,
and moved into other constellations. A good example currently
resides in the constellation Columba, the dove, which is far to
the south of Orion. The star is known as Mu Columbae. It's about
the same distance from Earth as the Orion Nebula -- about 1300
light-years. Mu Columbae is a hot, blue star that's much more
powerful than the Sun. But what's most remarkable is its path
through space: Mu Columbae is a "runaway" star -- it's shooting
away from the Orion Nebula at high speed. By tracking its motion
back in time, astronomers deduce that Mu Columbae was in the
Orion Nebula just two and a half million years ago. So the star
probably was born not in Columba, but in the Orion Nebula. But
it was catapulted