For a star, passing too close to a black hole is never a good thing. If the star doesn’t get eaten, it can get kicked into a high-speed jaunt across the cosmos. And astronomers can track the path of such a star back to its birthplace.

One such high-speed star is plowing through the galaxy at more than a million miles per hour. Today, it appears near the twins of Gemini. But it may have been born halfway across the sky, in Pegasus.

When astronomers traced the star’s path, they found that it intersected with the star cluster Messier 15 about 20 million years ago. The star is the same age as the stars in the cluster, and it has the same composition. That suggests the star was born in M15, then booted out – probably by an encounter with a black hole more than a hundred times the mass of the Sun.

Other astronomers had reported the possibility of such a black hole more than 20 years ago. And the high-speed star appears to confirm it.

Originally, the star would have been a member of a binary. But the two stars passed close to the black hole – closer than Earth is from the Sun. In a complex gravitational dance, the binary was ripped apart. One star was gobbled up by the black hole. But the other one got away – beginning a high-speed dash across the galaxy.

Today, the star is more than 37,000 light-years from the cluster – a possible survivor of a close encounter with a black hole.

Script by Damond Benningfield