A hypervelocity star has been recently discovered by researchers. What makes this discovery unique is the fact that the star is the closest, second-brightest and among the largest of 20 found so far.

Astronomers have revealed that it is traveling at a speed more than one million miles per hour. Scientists are optimistic that the star would be a significant help to find clues about the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way and the halo of mysterious 'dark matter' surrounding the galaxy.

The Hypervelocity is a great discovery because it provides a lot of information about Milky Way galaxy, especially about its center and the dark mater halo, said Zheng Zheng, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy and lead author of the study. "So this dark matter halo is made of dark matter, but we don't know what dark matter is. But we know dark matter must exist from the gravitational effect on the star", he added

Zheng said that the discovery of the new hypervelocity star was serendipitous. They were conducting other research into stars with the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) when they made the discovery. LAMOST is at the Xinglong Observing Station of the National Astronomical Observatories of China.

It may sound surprising to you that despite being the closest hypervelocity star, it is still 249 quadrillion miles from Earth, i. e. 1,000,000,000,000,000 miles.

Scientists have discovered around 20 members of a strange class of celestial bodies called as hypervelocity stars in last ten years. Scientists say the remnant of a binary star system most probably becomes a hypervelocity star after approaching too close to the supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, which is located at the heart of the Milky Way.

After going very close to the black hole, one member of the binary pair is captured by it, whereas the other star is thrown away on a new trajectory at phenomenal speeds because of the extreme gravity of the black hole.