Hypervelocity Stars Approach Speed of Light

<i>&quot;For the special case of the ejection of binary stars, described in Section 6, we employ octuple floating-point precision (~64 digits).&quot;</i><p><a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.5022" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1411.5022</a>

Great article on Centauri Dreams speculating about what a civilisation living on a planet orbiting such a star might experience: <a href="http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=12671" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.centauri-dreams.org&#x2F;?p=12671</a>

&gt; <i>Superfast stars would be another sort of “particles,” albeit huge, shining ones</i><p>Have I misunderstood the difference between stars and neutrinos my whole life or is the journalist getting creative?

&gt; (Black hole interactions also give rise to hypervelocity stars within the Milky Way, but here there’s just a single black hole, and thus a lot less energy available.)<p>Pretty sure this is wrong. The abstract of the real article says that their conclusion depends on assumptions about the eccentricities of orbits of merging black holes, not the absolute amount of mass involved.

&gt; “We calculate that there should be more than a trillion stars in the observable universe moving at velocities of more than a tenth the speed of light,” says Loeb.<p>But wouldn&#x27;t they be extremely easy to detect experimentally (through red&#x2F;blue shift a.k.a. doppler)? I&#x27;m a bit puzzled why this sounds purely theoretical...

There was scifi novel describing something like that in 70ties.<p>Anyway, I seriously doubt this is possible. Escape velocity from center of star is tiny fraction of speed of light. We might have better luck with neutron start or black hole going at near speed of light.

I wonder what this would do in case of a collision with another object.