Pictured is a heavy runaway star rushing away from a nearby stellar nursery at more than 400 000 kilometres per hour, a speed that would get you to the Moon and back in two hours, is the most extreme case of a very massive star that has been kicked out of its home by a group of even heftier siblings. Tantalizing clues from three observatories, including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s newly installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), and some old-fashioned detective work, suggest that the star may have travelled about 375 light-years from its suspected home, a giant star cluster called R136.


The homeless star is on the outskirts of the 30 Doradus Nebula, a raucous stellar breeding ground in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud. The finding bolsters evidence that the most massive stars in the local Universe reside in 30 Doradus, making it a unique laboratory for studying heavyweight stars. 30 Doradus, also called the Tarantula Nebula, is roughly 170 000 light-years from Earth. Nestled in the core of 30 Doradus, R136 contains several stars topping 100 solar masses each. The observations offer insights into how massive star clusters behave.