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The black streaks are the newly discovered giant top style. This line is 10 times as long as the Milky Way, and the galaxies (yellow dots) are about 300 million light-years apart.Credit: William Herschel Telescope/Román et al.
Surprisingly, an international research team has discovered a huge and very faint star stream between galaxies. Rivers are already known to flow in our galaxy and neighboring galaxies, but this is the first time a river has been observed flowing between galaxies. This is the largest stream ever detected.Astronomers published their research results in a journal astronomy and astrophysics.
The first observations were made with astronomer Michael Rich’s relatively small 70-centimeter telescope in California (USA). The researchers then focused their 4.2-meter-diameter William Herschel telescope (La Palma, Spain) on the area. As a result of image processing, a very weak stream was visible, more than 10 times the length of the Milky Way. This stream is not associated with any galaxy in particular and appears to float in the center of the cluster environment. Researchers have dubbed this the giant coma flow.
“It was a coincidence that this huge river crossed in front of us,” explains lead researcher Javier Roman. He is affiliated with the University of Groningen (Netherlands) and the University of Laguna (Spain) in Tenerife. “We were studying the halos of stars around large galaxies.”
The discovery of the giant koma style is noteworthy. That’s because it’s a fairly fragile structure in a harsh environment where galaxies attract and repel each other. Co-author Reynier Peletier (University of Groningen, Netherlands) explains: -meter When ELT and Euclid start generating data. ”
With future large telescopes, researchers not only hope to discover new giant streams. They also want to zoom in on the Giant Coma Stream itself. “We want to observe individual stars in and near rivers and learn more about dark matter,” Pelletier says.
The Kaminoke Galaxy Cluster is one of the most well-studied galaxy clusters. It contains thousands of galaxies located approximately 300 million light-years north of Earth in the direction of the constellation Coma. In 1933, Swiss astronomer Fritz his Zwicky showed that galaxies in galaxy clusters were moving too fast if only the amount of visible matter was considered. He thought there must be dark matter that binds things together. The exact nature of dark matter is still unknown.
For more information:
Javier Román and others, the giant thin starstream of the Kami Galaxy Cluster, astronomy and astrophysics (2023). DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202346780, www.aanda.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202346780.upon arXiv: DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2305.03073