White dwarfs — the superdense, slowly cooling embers left behind when stars like our sun die — are usually quiet cosmic relics. A rare few, however, are anything but. In recent years, astronomers analyzing data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft identified a handful of white dwarfs hurtling through the Milky Way at breakneck speeds of up to 1,240 …
Read More »Galactic cannonballs: The mystery of hypervelocity white dwarfs may just have been solved
