High-Speed Stars Make Telltale Waves

"Over the past year, we have identified hundreds of hot, massive star candidates streaming at supersonic speeds," William Chick said last week at a press conference at the 227th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Kissimmee. Chick, a graduate student at the University of Wyoming, is part of a team of astronomers that pored through archived images taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Spitzer Space Telescopes in search of the wavelike structures, then i