With the Perseids active, we all know that shooting stars are actually meteors, but it turns out that shooting stars may be a real thing.

An observation program which ran from 2005 to 2014 has confirmed the existence of so-called hypervelocity stars which move at speeds of millions of miles per hour.

There is still little known about these stars, but the theory behind them has existed since 1988. Their origin appears to rest in binary star systems, these are pairs of stars gravitationally bound to, and in orbit with, each other.

In the theory, when these pairs move too close to a black hole, they break apart. When this happens, one star is shot at hyper-speed, sometimes beyond the limits of their own solar system.

Amazingly, the observational data has confirmed that the theory is true.

While observing the Milky Way’s halo, a star, HVS1, moving at 3.2 million km/h was spotted. Computer simulations predict that the other star was left orbiting the black hole which ripped the system apart.

A new theory suggests that if a planet orbiting a star, much like Earth and the Sun, were to encounter a black hole hypervelocity planets could also be a reality.

Fortunately for us, that does remain just a theory for now, but we do know that actual shooting stars are travelling across the universe.