What is the fastest thing on a highway that you have never seen?
A long, slender stream of ancient stars has been discovered racing across the northern sky at some 230 kilometers per second, or more than half a million miles per hour.
"What we can see of the stream is over 30,000 light years long, although it may actually be much longer than that since we are currently limited by the extent of the survey data. I would actually be somewhat surprised if the stream doesn't extend completely around the Galaxy," says a Canadian astronomer Dr. Carl Grillmair and his colleague Odysseas Dionatos from the Astronomical Observatory of Rome.
The astronomers believe the stars on this cosmic "highway" date back nearly to the beginning of the Universe and are the fossil remains of a star cluster that, in its prime, contained between 10,000 and 100,000 stars. The ancient cluster was torn apart over billions of years by the tidal forces of our Milky Way Galaxy.
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