Researchers have made a surprising discovery in the Coma galaxy cluster, a collection of more than a thousand galaxies: a huge intergalactic band of stars that is about ten times longer than our Milky Way and presents a puzzle for astronomers.
Such streams of stars have already been found in our own galaxy and in nearby galaxies, but according to an international team of researchers, this is the first time such a band of suns has moved between galaxies. The stream of stars called the ‘Giant Coma Stream’ – the largest ever discovered – is therefore relatively narrow and located far away from all galaxies in free (intergalactic) space.
Starband was discovered by accident
The discovery happened completely by chance. A team led by Javier Román from the University of Groningen actually wanted to investigate the matter distribution and structure of the Coma star cluster, which is located about 300 million light years away. But in images taken by the William Herschel Telescope on La Palma (Spain) they found something extremely unusual. An elongated, thin strip of stars moving towards each other – a so-called stellar stream
The ‘Giant Coma Stream’ is about 1.6 million light-years long, making it about ten times as long as the Milky Way, the scientists write in the journal ‘Astronomy & Astrophysics’. “This enormous stream crossed our path purely by chance,” says lead researcher Javier Román, who conducts research at the University of Groningen (Netherlands) and the University of La Laguna in Tenerife (Spain).
“We have now been able to simulate such enormous flows on the computer. We expect to find even more. For example, when we search with the ELT (the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope under construction, note) and when ‘Euclid’ (an ESA space telescope, note; see image below) starts sending data to Earth,” astronomer Reynier Peletier quoted on the website of the University of Groningen.
How such a long but thin band of stars could be preserved in the turbulent environment of the Coma star cluster is still a mystery to astronomers. Normally, such streams of stars are gravitationally spun around shortly after formation and eventually torn apart. It is still unclear to the researchers exactly why this did not happen.
Source: Krone
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