DC Comics’ Scarlet Speedster the Flash could feature cosmic rivalry in the form of six newly discovered runaway stars floating in the Milky Way. Six new runaway stars have been discovered floating in the Milky Way. Two superfast stars, designated J0927 and J1235, are moving faster than any object of their kind ever seen, Space.com reports.

According to new research, these record-breaking stars are moving at an incredible 5.1 million miles per hour (2,285 kilometers per second) and 3.8 million miles per hour (1,694 kilometers per second), respectively. J0927 has the fastest orbital speed ever seen, allowing it to travel between New York and Mississippi in less than a second if it were a terrestrial object. At this speed, the object could fly around the Earth 694 times in just one hour.

The other four stars aren’t too bad in the speed department either, all traveling at over 2.2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second). These hyper-speed stars are moving so fast in the Milky Way that they have the speed necessary to escape our galaxy’s gravity, also known as the escape velocity.

“These stars are extraordinary because they move much faster than normal stars in the Milky Way. Because they are faster than the galactic exit velocity, they will soon be launched into intergalactic space,” said team leader and Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. This was said by researcher Karim El-Badri. “We were looking for such objects, so we had some hope and expectation that they would exist, but their properties were different from what we expected.”

The research team believes the incredible speed of these four stars may be the result of their ejection by a special type of cosmic explosion called a Type Ia supernova. It also provided an unusually high surface temperature, which El-Badri said surprised the team.

“They’re also much hotter than normal stars – possibly a result of their unusual formation date, which included a supernova that exploded right next to them!” – explained the astrophysicist.

Type Ia supernovae occur in binary systems that contain a stellar remnant called a white dwarf, formed when stars like the Sun die by feeding on material from a companion star.

Also known as “degenerate stars,” white dwarfs are incredibly dense as a result of the collapse of a stellar core with a mass close to that of the Sun, compressed into an Earth-sized sphere, but not large enough to pass through. so called Chandrasekhar borderis the mass required for a star to go into a “normal” supernova and, when it dies, create a neutron star or even a black hole.

The stellar remnant gathers mass as material from the donor companion falls onto the surface of the white dwarf. This means that the stellar material donation process can give a white dwarf the critical mass it needs to exceed the Chandrasekhar limit, thereby triggering a thermonuclear explosion called a Type Ia supernova.

Not only are these explosions some of the brightest events in the universe, but they are so uniform that astronomers refer to them as “standard candles” because they can use them to measure cosmic distances.

While any supernova releases enough energy to create runaway stars, the team believes a much more violent and powerful supernova might be needed to bring these stars into a hypervelocity state. These special explosions are called “powerful helium-driven mergers” or “dynamically driven double degenerate double bursts”.

D⁶ supernovae occur when white dwarfs eject helium instead of hydrogen from the outer layers of their companion star, which is thought to be another white dwarf (hence double degeneration). This results in a second powerful explosion (hence a double explosion) that causes the white dwarf satellite to be ejected as a hypervelocity escaped star.

“The composition of runaway stars is very unusual,” El Badri explained. “The atmospheres of almost all stars in the Milky Way consist mostly of hydrogen and helium, but these objects contain no hydrogen or helium and are mostly made up of carbon and oxygen.”

This suggests that these runaway stars are degenerate white dwarfs and further supports the idea that they were accelerated to extreme speeds by the D⁶ supernova.