Runaway planets zipping through space at mind-numbing speeds of
30 million miles per hour are now the fastest objects in the
universe, says a study. Seven years ago, the discovery of the
first runaway star, shooting out of our Galaxy at a staggering
speed of 1.5 million mph, set astronomers on a course of
exploration. If a star can get tossed outward at such an extreme
velocity, could the same thing happen to planets, they asked
themselves, the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal
Astronomical Society reported. "Other than subatomic particles,
I don't know of anything leaving our galaxy as fast as these
runaway planets," said Idan Ginsburg of Dartmouth College, US,
who led the study, according to a Harvard-Smithsonian statement.
"These warp-speed planets would be some of the fastest objects
in our Galaxy. If you lived on one of them, you'd be in for a
wild ride from the centre of the galaxy to the Universe at
large," said astrophysicist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian
Centre for Astrophysics. A typical hy