From galaxy to galaxy, these celestial bodies leave their trail: they are called ghost stars. Thanks to hubble telescope of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (POT, for its acronym in English), astronomers investigated its origin, locating it billions of years ago.
In the future, they hope to delve deeper into their training, with the new James Webb Space Telescope.
hyungjin joo Y M.James Jee published in the journal Nature the research titled “Intracluster light is already abundant at redshift beyond unity”.
Infrared observations from NASA’s Hubble Telescope suggest that the ghost stars (also known as wandering stars) They have been around for billions of years.
The scientists analyzed ten galaxy clusters nearly ten billion light-years away, revealing that the fraction of intracluster light relative to total light in the cluster remains constant. a cumulus It is a group of stars whose members are gravitationally linked to each other.
“This means,” explains Jee, of Yonsei University in South Korea, “that these stars already had no home in the early stages of cluster formation.”
What forced the stars to become wandering ghosts?
Stars can scatter away from their galactic birthplace when a galaxy moves. it does through the gaseous material in the space between galaxies, as it orbits the center of the cluster.
According to astronomers, during this process, the drag pushes gas and dust out of the galaxy.
“We don’t know exactly what made them homeless,” Jee says. “Current theories cannot explain our results, but somehow, they were produced in large numbers in the early Universe.”
In his early formative years, galaxies could have been quite small and they bleed stars quite easily due to a weaker gravitational grip.”
For his partner Joo, discover the origin of the stars intraclusters will help to understand the assembly history of an entire galaxy cluster.
“They can serve as visible tracers of the dark matter that surrounds the cluster”, emphasizes the researcher.
