Orphaned Stars Were Lost into Intergalactic Space Long Ago In the 1960s sci-fi television show 'Lost in Space' a small family of would-be planetary colonists get off course and lost in our galaxy. But truth is stranger than fiction when it comes to Hubble Space Telescope discoveries. Thanks t
There are numerous stars in giant clusters of hundreds or thousands of galaxies that wander among the galaxies like lost souls, emitting a ghostly haze of light. These stars are not gravitationally bound to any one galaxy in a cluster. A recent infrared survey by the Hubble Space Telescope suggests that these stars have been wandering around for billions of years and are not a result of more recent activity within the cluster that would strip them out of normal galaxies.
The nagging question for astronomers has been: how did the stars get so scattered throughout the cluster in the first place? Several competing theories include the possibility that the stars were stripped out of a cluster’s galaxies, or they were tossed around after mergers of galaxies, or they were present early in a cluster’s formative years many billions of years ago.’s Hubble Space Telescope, which looked for this so-called “intracluster light” sheds new light on the mystery.
This image shows near-infrared wavelengths of light. The color key shows which filters were used when collecting the light. The color of each filter name is the color used to represent the wavelength that passes through that filter. Note that the distance in light-years and parsecs shown on this scale bar applies to the galaxy cluster, not to foreground or background objects.Stars can be scattered outside of their galactic birthplace when a galaxy moves through gaseous material in the space between galaxies, as it orbits the center of the cluster. In the process, drag pushes gas and dust out of the galaxy.
If the wandering stars were produced through a comparatively recent pinball game among galaxies, they do not have enough time to scatter throughout the entire gravitational field of the cluster and therefore would not trace the distribution of the cluster’s dark matter. But if the stars were born in the cluster’s early years, they will have fully dispersed throughout the cluster. This would allow astronomers to use the wayward stars to map out the dark matter distribution across the cluster.
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