Institute for Advanced Study Astrophysics Seminar

ABSTRACT: A massive black hole sits in the heart of the Milky Way. One consequence of the black hole is that it ejects "hypervelocity stars" from the Milky Way at ~1000 km/s velocities. We discovered the first hypervelocity star in 2005, and since then our targeted survey has discovered 20 unbound stars and a comparable number of possibly bound hypervelocity stars. Recent results include a surprising anisotropic spatial distribution of hypervelocity stars, unbound disk runaways, and HST proper motion measurements that may allow us constrain the shape and orientation of the Galactic potential.