Three's a crowd, even in space

摘要

Love triangles can be brutal, and it's no different for stars. Single stars that try to come between a stellar pair are flung away at breakneck speeds, accounting for "runaway" stars in the Milky Way. These speedsters used to be thought of as fleeing a partner that exploded as a supernova. But last year, two runaways were found hightailing it out of a cluster of stars that were simply too young to die in the blasts. Simulations by Michiko Fujii and Simon Portegies Zwart of Leiden University in the Netherlands suggest that each runaway slipped into orbit around a stellar pair, and was booted out because the trio was eravitationally unstable (Science,DOI:10.1126/science.121192.