2022-05-04 15:23:36
Our eyesight was for most of our history the only instrument with which we could observe the stars. That limited vision barely showed a tiny part of everything that exists in the Cosmos, a limitation that we began to overcome from the beginning of the century. XVII when Galileo focused the first telescope on the firmament. This is how the revolution began, it has completely changed our perception of the Universe.
As bigger and better telescopes were built, the number of observable stars multiplied, and we became aware that our Sun is just an ordinary star revolving with hundreds of billions of them around a common center, the Milky Way. Beyond we discovered other stellar agglomerations similar to ours, new galaxies that stretched in the distance showing the reality of a complex and enormous Universe.
Now we know that billions of galaxies exist, some of them forming groups that bring together hundreds of thousands of them; some groups that astronomers like Mireia Montes, our guest today in Talking with Scientists, call clusters of galaxies. Mireia Montes is a postdoctoral researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute, a research center based in Baltimore (Marylad, USA) and has set its sights on the space that separates the galaxies that make up those clusters. If stars are born and develop in galaxies, we might think that beyond, in the cold space that separates these enormous structures, there is nothing, but that is not the case.
When telescopes such as Hubble focus long enough on far-distant galaxy clusters, the images reveal that the space between the galaxies sheds a dim light, called intracluster light. That light has its origin in wandering stars that have escaped the iron control to which they are subjected by galaxies and swarm alone in the enormous empty space that exists between them.
How did those wandering stars originate? Mireia says that the galaxies that make up the clusters are gravitationally connected and when they get close enough to each other, they create tidal forces that tear off the outermost stars and disperse them throughout the intergalactic medium. Thus, this intracluster light not only fills the space, but its existence provides information about the history of the cluster. In addition, these stars can form filaments or stellar streams where their density is greater and as a whole they serve to obtain information from the dark matter that is part of the cluster but is invisible to us because it does not emit radiation that we can capture.
Mireia Montes has recently published in the journal Nature Astronomy an article entitled The faint light in groups and clusters of galaxies. The article is a review that summarizes the most recent results on intracluster light and what this information contributes about the formation of the largest structures, bound by gravity, in the Universe.
I invite you to listen to Mireia Montes Quiles, STScl Prize Fellow en el Space Telescope Science Institute en Baltimore (Meriland, USA)
Referencia:
Montes, M. The faint light in groups and clusters of galaxies. Nature Astronomy 6, 308–316 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-022-01616-z
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