Scientists find a scattered piece of star crossing the Milky Way at a dizzying rate.

New research reports that a fragment of stellar shells is heading towards the edge of our Milky Way galaxy at nearly 2 million mph (3.2 million kph).

"The star moves so fast it almost certainly leaves the galaxy," co-lead author of the paper, J.J. Hermes, Associate Professor of Astronomy at the University of Boston, said in a press release.

The star, known as LP 40-365, is currently approximately 2,000 light-years away. And calling it a star may be a bit generous, actually; Hermes and his colleagues think it's a hunk of a superdense stellar corpse called a white dwarf that was blown apart in a violent supernova explosion after gobbling up too much mass from a companion.

"To have gone through partial detonation, and still survive is very cool and unique, and it's only in the last few years that we've started to think this kind of star could exist," study co-author Odelia Putterman, a former Boston University student who has worked in Hermes' lab, said in the same statement.

The fast star was identified during an analysis of survey data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the Transit Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The researchers have noted that LP 40-365 is not only racing along but is also rotating once every nine hours that it goes.

The rotation itself is nothing unusual, as all the stars rotate; our own sun rotates along its axis every 27 Earth days. However, the researchers state that a nine-hour rotation period is relatively slow when an object has passed through something as catastrophic as a supernova.

This slow rotation implies that the LP 40-365 was formerly part of a two-star system with a bad eating habit.

According to the researchers, stars usually orbit in close pairs, including high-density white dwarfs. In such binary systems, if one white dwarf transfers too much mass to the other, the result can be a supernova — the largest explosion that takes place in space, according to NASA.

It's usually hard to determine which star was the "donor" and which was the "eater." But because LP 40-365's rotation is relatively slow, the research team feels confident that the object is cosmic shrapnel from the exploded star. As the two stars orbited each other at high speeds and close, the resulting supernova likely catapulted both stars out at breakneck speed, but we've only been able to spot LP 40-365, according to the statement.

"This [document] adds another layer of knowledge on the role these stars played when the supernova occurred,' and what can happen after the explosion, Putterman said. "By understanding what is happening with this particular star, we can begin to understand what is happening with so many more similar stories that come from a similar situation."

These supernovae survivors are all the more intriguing because they are rich in metals, unlike our sun, which is mainly made up of hydrogen and helium. (Astronomers consider everything heavier than hydrogen and helium to be a metal. )

"Those are really strange stories." "What we're seeing are the byproducts of violent nuclear reactions that happen when a star blows itself up." Strange stars like LP 40-365 are therefore fascinating targets to study, the researchers said.

The research is outlined in a study published June 10 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.