How Three Runaway Stars Solved A Galactic Mystery

All motion is relative. That simple fact makes tracking the motion of distant objects outside our galaxy particularly challenging. For example, there has been a debate among astronomers for decades about the path that one of our nearest neighbors, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), took over the last few billion years. A new paper from Scott Lucchini and Jiwon Jesse Hand from the Harvard Center for Astrophysics grapples with that question by using a unique technique – the paths of hypervelocity stars.