Letter to the Editor

PG 1610+062: a runaway B star challenging classical ejection mechanisms

¹ Dr. Karl Remeis-Observatory & ECAP, Astronomical Institute, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU), Sternwartstr. 7, 96049 Bamberg, Germany
e-mail: andreas.irrgang@fau.de
² Institut für Physik und Astronomie, Universität Potsdam, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 24/25, 14476 Potsdam, Germany
³ Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA
⁴ Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
⁵ European Space Astronomy Centre (ESA/ESAC), Operations Department, Villanueva de la Canada, Madrid, Spain

Received: 7 March 2019
Accepted: 10 July 2019

Abstract

Hypervelocity stars are rare objects, mostly main-sequence (MS) B stars, traveling so fast that they will eventually escape from the Milky Way. Recently, it has been shown that the popular Hills mechanism, in which a binary system is disrupted via a close encounter with the supermassive black hole at the Galactic center, may not be their only ejection mechanism. The analyses of Gaia data ruled out a Galactic center origin for some of them, and instead indicated that they are extreme disk runaway stars ejected at velocities exceeding the predicted limits of classical scenarios (dynamical ejection from star clusters or binary supernova ejection). We present the discovery of a new extreme disk runaway star, PG 1610+062, which is a slowly pulsating B star bright enough to be studied in detail. A quantitative analysis of spectra taken with ESI at the Keck Observatory revealed that PG 1610+062 is a late B-type MS star of 4–5 M_⊙ with low projected rotational velocity. Abundances (C, N, O, Ne, Mg, Al, Si, S, Ar, and Fe) were derived differentially with respect to the normal B star HD 137366 and indicate that PG 1610+062 is somewhat metal rich. A kinematic analysis, based on our spectrophotometric distance (17.3 kpc) and on proper motions from Gaia’s second data release, shows that PG 1610+062 was probably ejected from the Carina-Sagittarius spiral arm at a velocity of 550 ± 40 km s⁻¹, which is beyond the classical limits. Accordingly, the star is in the top five of the most extreme MS disk runaway stars and is only the second among the five for which the chemical composition is known.