Astronomers don’t win because of fears. Around this time, an international team of researchers was surprised to see an enormous ‘stream of stars’ flowing like a river between more than 1,000 galaxies in the well-known Coma cluster, 300 million light-years from Earth.
Stellar streams were already known within our Milky Way and other nearby galaxies, but one flows in the middle of the vacuum of space, between one galaxy and another. At 1.7 million light-years long, the galactic river, known as the ‘Giant Coma Stream’, is the longest ever seen by astronomers. An incredible discovery has just been released ‘Astronomy & Astrophysics’.
The first observations were made with the relatively small 70 cm telescope of astronomer and paper co-author Michael Rich in California. But then, when focusing on the accompanying area Telescope William Herschel4.2 meters, taking new images and processing them, astronomers can clearly see the stream of stars, a ‘river of light’ ten times the length of our Milky Way, floating in intergalactic space, among the cluster of galaxies but not particularly interacting with any of them.
The discovery is surprising because the giant coma stream is a fragile system in the middle of a hostile environment of galaxies that constantly attract and repel each other. According to another of the study’s authors, Rainer Pelletier, after the unexpected discovery “we were able to simulate such massive flows on the computer. So we hope to find more of them. For example, we can use the future 39-meter ELT (Very Large Telescope) and the Euclid mission recently launched by the European Space Agency to generate data. We’ll see when it starts.”
You can listen to all episodes of the ‘Dark Matter’ podcast here Spotify, Ivox, The Apple Podcast Y Google Podcast.
