Astronomers spot giant stream of stars between galaxies

To their shock, a world staff of researchers has found an enormous and very faint stream of stars between galaxies. Whereas streams are already identified in our personal galaxy and in close by galaxies, that is the primary time {that a} stream operating between galaxies has been noticed. It’s the largest stream detected to this point. The astronomers have printed their findings within the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The primary observations have been made with astronomer Michael Wealthy’s comparatively small 70-centimeter telescope in California (United States of America). Subsequent, the researchers targeted the 4.2-meter William Herschel telescope (La Palma, Spain) on the world. After image processing, they noticed a particularly faint stream greater than 10 instances the size of our Milky Way. The stream seems floating in the course of the cluster atmosphere, not related to any galaxy particularly. The researchers have named it the Large Coma Stream.

“This large stream crossed our path by coincidence,” explains lead researcher Javier Román. He’s affiliated with the College of Groningen (the Netherlands) and the College of La Laguna in Tenerife (Spain). “We have been learning halos of stars positioned round giant galaxies.”

The invention of the Large Coma Stream is exceptional as a result of it’s a slightly fragile construction amid a hostile atmosphere of mutually attracting and repelling galaxies. Co-author Reynier Peletier (College of Groningen, the Netherlands) explains, “In the meantime, we have now been in a position to simulate such big flows within the laptop. We subsequently anticipate finding extra of them. For instance, if we search with the longer term 39-meter ELT and when Euclid begins producing information.”

With giant future telescopes, the researchers not solely hope to find new large streams. Additionally they need to zoom in on the Large Coma Stream itself. “We might love to watch particular person stars in and close to the stream and study extra about dark matter,” says Peletier.

The Coma Cluster is without doubt one of the best-studied clusters of galaxies. It incorporates hundreds of galaxies at a distance of about 300 million light-years from Earth within the route of the northern constellation Coma Berenices. In 1933, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky confirmed that the galaxies within the cluster transfer too quick if you happen to solely take the quantity of seen matter under consideration. He found out that there should be dark matter that retains issues collectively. The precise nature of dark matter continues to be unknown.