Talk:US 708

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Someone added the assertion: "In 2015, Stephan Geier of the European Southern Observatory led a team that reported in Science that the velocity of the star was 1,200 kilometers per second, the highest ever recorded in the galaxy."

I could only see the abstract at the article referenced. The abstract doesn't say the star's velocity is the highest ever recorded. It says it is the "fastest unbound star". I am not an astronomer, so I would have to guess at the meaning of "unbound" in this phrase. We are not RS. We are not allowed to guess. So I question whether Geier should be paraphrased like that. The paraphrase could be asserting something at odds with what Geier said. Geo Swan (talk) 04:52, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Okay, other references called it the fastest star, dropping the qualifier "unbound". Those references should have been cited in that paragraph. So I moved some there. Geo Swan (talk) 05:11, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
• Dropping the qualifier "unbound" makes the statement incorrect. There tens of stars orbiting the central black hole of the Milky way that are much faster than this star. For example, S175, S14 and S2 move up to 4.27%, 3.83% and 2.56% of the speed of light respectively. That's almost 13000 km/s for the fastest one, which is 10x as fast as this US 708. Amaurea (talk) 13:05, 5 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The first sentence currently says: "US 708 is a [[Stellar kinematics#High-velocity stars|hyper-velocity]]

I have several problems with this sentence. First, in general, if a topic is worthy of a wikilink, it is worthy of a standalone article. Wikilinks to subsections within other articles aren't fully supported, and should be avoided. Second, if the star is a hyper-velociy star, why does the wikilink target [[Stellar kinematics#High-velocity stars]]?

Even if we accept wikilinking to a subsection heading, this wikilink is misleading. It promises [[Stellar kinematics#Hyper-velocity stars]] but delivers [[Stellar kinematics#High-velocity stars]]

The problems with wikilinking to a subsection include:

1. Articles start with a lead paragraph. Readers are entitled to expect a lead paragraph as the first thing that greets them, when they follow a link to a new article.
2. A wikilink to a subsection within an article is actually TWO links so far as the back button is concerned. This technique makes the back button function inconsistently.
3. Ordinary wikilinks are robust. Robots that support redirects make sure that wikilinks continue to work as expected even if the target article's name is changed. Wikilinks to subsection headings within an article are fragile. If an editor changes the section heading from "high-velocity" to "high velocity" the wikilink no longer works
4. There is no equivalent to the "what links here" button for wikilinks to subsection headings. The "what links here" feature is extremely useful.
5. We can't put a section heading on our watchlists.

If a topic is worthy of a wikilink it is worth a standalone article.

I am going to go to Talk:Stellar kinematics and propose a fork. Geo Swan (talk) 18:15, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]