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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

Ever wonder why the earth does not "fall down"? There is an ancient theory, that this does not happen because the earth rests upon the back of a ginormous elephant. Fair enough, you reply, but what keeps the elephant from falling down, and taking the earth with it? The answer is: "The elephant stands upon the back of an equally ginormous tortoise!" And what keeps this tortoise from falling? Another tortoise! And that? Another. And that? Finally in exasperation, the proponent of primitive cosmology says: "Look, it 's turtles all the way down!"

So, currently, we have a similar problem. Why do not know why galaxies, particularly our own, do not fly apart into the vastness of inter-galactic space, or fall "down" into the super massive black hole alleged to occupy their centers? Well, we have no answer to that yet, and the dark matter thing is prohibited from discussion in this thread, but we do have some interesting evidence that at least some of the galaxy can go shooting off and out of the Milky Way galaxy. Reporting at LiveScience [livescience.com].

As humankind's ancestors were learning to walk upright, a star was launched out of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy at a staggering 3.7 million mph (6 million km/h).

Five million years after this dramatic ejection, a group of researchers, led by Sergey Koposov of Carnegie Mellon University's McWilliams Center for Cosmology, has spotted the star, known as S5-HVS1, in the Crane-shaped constellation Grus. The star was spotted traveling relatively close to Earth (29,000 light-years away) at unprecedented, searing speeds — about 10 times faster than most stars in our galaxy.

"The velocity of the discovered star is so high that it will inevitably leave the galaxy and never return," Douglas Boubert, a researcher at the University of Oxford and a co-author on the study, said in a statement. [carnegiescience.edu]

Just for reference, searing speed is still no where near the speed of light, which is 6.706e+8 MPH, or 5.827e+8 knots, for you mariners.

The star was discovered with observations from the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT), a 12.8-foot (3.9-meter) telescope, and the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite. The discovery was made as part of the Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey (S5), a collaboration of astronomers from Chile, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia.

I just love it when humans can all work together to investigate the nature of reality. Now if only the non-gruntled Hawaiians would get off the road, [imuatmt.org] so we could do more of that.

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