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Is a Cosmic Pinball Game Billions of Years Old to Blame for Homeless Galaxy Cluster Stars?

When the lucky ones among us look up at the night sky, they get to see a glimpse of the Universe’s past. The light shining down on us from billions of miles away also shines down at times from billions of years ago, and many of these sources of light might have died out in the meantime. Or were stripped out from their own galaxies by unknown forces.
Ghost light in galaxy clusters remains constant over the eons 12 photos
Photo: NASA/ESA/STScI/James Jee (Yonsei University)
Ghost light in galaxy clusters remains constant over the eonsJames Webb Telescope sharpness checkJames Webb Telescope as seen by GaiaJames Webb Telescope as seen by GaiaJames Webb Telescope as seen by GaiaJames Webb telescope deploys its massive mirrorJames Webb telescope deploys its massive mirrorJames Webb telescope deploys its massive mirrorJames Webb telescope deploys its massive mirrorJames Webb telescope deploys its massive mirrorJames Webb telescope deploys its massive mirror
As we generally know them, stars are fiery balls of hot gas that emit light. They may or may not be accompanied by solar systems, and they tend to come together in galaxies. Galaxies comprise billions of stars and their respective solar systems, and they too come together in formations called clusters, comprising possibly thousands of galaxies linked by their own gravity.

The general idea coming from such a simplistic description of the Universe could have one believe all stars have a solar system or at least they belong to a galaxy. That’s not entirely true, as scientists have long ago detected the presence of wandering stars, not tied to any galaxy in their cluster.

That would be Suns not unlike our own that were somehow pushed, early in the life of the Universe, out of their own “galactic birthplace“ by forces that are not yet properly understood, effectively making them homeless in the process.

There are several theories as to why that could be so. The most prominent of them speaks of stars being pushed outside the place of their birth by a galaxy’s movement “through gaseous material in the space between galaxies, as it orbits the center of the cluster.“ We’ll call this the drag theory.

But that theory might not be all that correct, if we are to trust the findings of a new Hubble study conducted by James Jee of Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, and published in Nature magazine.

The study used data gathered by the Hubble telescope as it was looking at ten galaxy clusters located as far out as 10 billion light years away from our planet, in a bid to find traces of these homeless planets, in the form of something called intracluster light, or ghost light. That’s quite difficult, given how this light is, as per NASA, 10,000 times dimmer than the night sky as seen from the ground, but not impossible to spot for a space-based telescope.

The study’s findings point to the fact intracluster light relative to the total light in the cluster remains constant over the eons, which means stars no longer become homeless today, but have done so billions of years in the past, in the early stages of formation. This finding removes the possibility of the drag theory being correct, otherwise that fraction would have increased over time as more stars were expelled.

Scientists are now considering a sort of galactic pinball game as the potential source of wandering stars, but also the possibility of them being born as such in the early stages of the galaxies. To prove this new theory, they'll now be looking at dark matter.

If a simple pinball-like movement of galaxies and stars is responsible for homeless stars, the celestial bodies will not trace the distribution of the cluster's dark matter. If, on the other hand, were born as such, they could help scientists “map out the dark matter distribution across the cluster.”

Don’t expect results for this cosmic-sized endeavor to come to light any time soon, though, as this work is only beginning.
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Editor's note: Gallery shows various images from the most recent space telescope, the James Webb.

About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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