The Andromeda galaxy cluster is bathed in the gentle blue light emitted by solitary stars. These lone stars are scattered throughout the cluster, with some as far as 2 million light-years from the center. Image Source: European Space Agency
According to the website of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on the 23rd, the first batch of scientific photos taken by the European Space Agency's Euclid telescope revealed over 1.5 trillion "orphan stars" scattered in the Andromeda galaxy cluster. Led by astronomers from the University of Nottingham in the UK, this discovery sheds light on the origins of these celestial wanderers.
Located 240 million light-years away from Earth, the Andromeda galaxy cluster is one of the largest structures in the universe, housing thousands of galaxies. However, within this cosmic congregation, the Euclid telescope captured faint glows drifting between galaxies - the orphan stars.
Stars are expected to naturally form within galaxies, so the presence of these "orphan stars" outside of these structures has sparked speculation about their origins. Astronomers involved in this study suggest that these stars may have been ejected from the edges of galaxies or separated during the disintegration of dwarf galaxies.
After breaking away from their parent galaxies, these "orphan stars" were supposed to orbit the largest galaxy within the cluster. However, further observations indicate that the Andromeda cluster may have undergone a merger with another group of galaxies. This merger caused gravitational disturbances, leading the most massive galaxies or "orphan stars" to deviate from their expected orbits, resulting in the observed misalignment.
The Euclid mission aims to explore the composition and evolution of the dark universe. The telescope will observe trillions of galaxies spanning billions of light-years, covering over a third of the sky, creating a large-scale map of the universe across space and time. The Euclid mission will also investigate how the universe expands, how its structures formed throughout history, and reveal the nature of gravity, dark energy, and dark matter.
The revolutionary design of the Euclid telescope means it can capture images with clarity similar to the Hubble Space Telescope but with a coverage area 175 times larger.
