#all right all right all right space-travel orphean rescue story let's go

[penmeetspage]

...Supernovae are asymmetrical and the uneven explosion can boot the remnant out of the main disk of the Milky Way. Young remnants won’t have moved very far in the short time since their demise; older ones are long gone. Based on calculations, the team found that 40% of neutron stars and 2% of black holes are kicked so hard that they’re ejected from the galaxy entirely to wander intergalactic space alone.

The remainder are still caught in the Milky Way's gravitational clutches, and Sweeney and his team set out to find out where they are. “It was like trying to find the mythical elephant's graveyard,” says Tuthill. “The bones of these rare massive stars had to be out there, but they seemed to shroud themselves in mystery.”

Sweeney and his team constructed a simulated map of their current locations using a highly detailed statistical model that factored in the birth, death, and ejection of these ancient stars. They found that, rather than being located in one plane like the disk-shaped Milky Way, they likely form a spherical cloud that stretches to three times the disk’s height. This reflects the completely random nature of the original kicks.

“It was a bit of a shock,” says team member Sanjib Sharma (University of Sydney). “I work every day with images of the visible galaxy we know today, and I expected that the galactic underworld would be subtly different, but similar in broad strokes. I was not expecting such a radical change in form.” The spiral structure that a galaxy like ours is so famous for was also completely absent.