The massive, hot star seemed out of place when astronomers first spotted it in 2006, and now thanks to Hubble, we know why. The misfit, 30 Dor #016, appears to have been ejected from a cluster of even heftier stars, pinging off of them and off into space at tremendous speed.

The star is traveling away from the R136 star cluster at about 250,000 miles per hour. Just 1 or 2 million years old, the star already appears to have traveled 375 light-years from its place of birth.

"These results are of great interest because such dynamical processes in very dense, massive clusters have been predicted theoretically for some time, but this is the first direct observation of the process in such a region,” astronomer Nolan Walborn of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore said in a press release. Walborn is a member of the team that tracked down the star,

30 Dor #16 is 90 times more massive than the sun and resides in the Tarantula Nebula, approximately 170,000 light-years from Earth. It's part of the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Milky Way's third-closest neighbor.

You can see the R136 cluster in the middle left part of the imageabove. The runaway star is in the upper right, a bright blue spot trailing red dust. Check the annotated image below to make sure you've got your stars properly aligned.

*Images: European Southern Observatory. High resolution versions available.

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