The Euclid space telescope has discovered around 1.5 trillion orphan stars drifting through the Perseus galaxy cluster, one of the largest structures in the cosmos.
These orphan stars have been ripped from their original galaxies and now fill the space between galaxies in the Perseus cluster with a ghostly blue light.
This intracluster light is extremely faint, thousands of times darker than the night sky on Earth. Studying it can help understand dark matter distribution.
Euclid was able to see the faintest light in the cluster, which comes from between galaxies rather than from the galaxies themselves.
The orphan stars have a characteristic blue color and loose clustering, indicating they came from small disrupted dwarf galaxies or the outskirts of larger galaxies through interactions.
Surprisingly, the orphan stars do not orbit the two biggest galaxies as expected, but rather a point between them, suggesting a recent galaxy merger disturbed gravitational orbits.
Euclid also detected over 50,000 dense globular clusters of stars in Perseus, which likely contribute to the intracluster light and seem to have come from galaxy outskirts.
This helps verify Euclid’s ability to study galaxy and cluster evolution and the universe’s history. It represents an early scientific result from the telescope.
Source: Space
