Deep in the Galaxy, runaway stars are sometimes born. A monstrous force, a supernova explosion, flings them from their usual place. One such wanderer has recently been found: a star of the LP 40-365 class, a fragment of a white dwarf that survived an incomplete explosion.
The star's atmosphere is almost entirely neon and oxygen, as if only the fireproof coals remained from a campfire. It is hotter than its siblings, and its speed exceeds 600 kilometers per second. For comparison, that is the distance from Moscow to Saint Petersburg in one second. Such speed almost certainly means the star will leave the Milky Way forever.
This discovery aggravates a long-standing problem. Models of white dwarf explosions predict how much neon and oxygen should remain and how fast the debris should fly apart. But real LP 40-365 stars do not match the calculations: the composition is different, and the speeds are higher. So our understanding of such explosions needs revision.
An LP 40-365 star is not a whole star but just its scorched core, which the explosion did not manage to destroy completely.
In the movie Interstellar, the heroes use a gravitational slingshot around a black hole to gain speed; a runaway star gets its kick from a supernova explosion.