14 DAY TRIAL // Astronomers with the California Institute of Technology in the US claim to have found evidence that many of the stars that comprise the universe are renegades that are now aimlessly floating through space.
More precisely, these scientists argue that as many as half of the universe's stars do not have a galaxy to call their home. These orphaned celestial bodies are said to populate space regions in between galaxies, essentially forming a sea of stars.
Documenting rogue stars in the universe
In a paper in the journal Science, the astronomers detail that their claim that half of the stars in the universe are vagabonds is based on information provided by the Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER, for short).
Thus, two CIBER flights carried out in 2010 and 2012 allowed scientists to pin down a cosmic glow described by the California Institute of Technology specialists as rather diffuse.
This cosmic glow, never before documented until the CIBER flights, is said to represent more light than the galaxies thus far documented to be part and parcel of the universe could possibly produce.
Hence, it was concluded that the source of this diffuse cosmic light was a sea of stars floating about in space all on their own. Because they stand alone and are located at a considerable distance from our planet, these stars went unnoticed for decades.
“If this is true, then there is an entire population of stars that's been sitting out there, but because they are individually so faint we can really only see them in ensemble,” specialists Harvey Moseley with NASA commented on the discovery of the diffuse cosmic light.
“These stars produce as much background light as the galaxies themselves. That’s really exciting,” added astrophysicist and California Institute of Technology researcher Jamie Bock, as cited by Nature.
How did these stars become renegades?
This is yet to be confirmed, but astronomers have reasons to believe that these stars that are now cosmic vagabonds were once part and parcel of one galaxy or another. Thus, the celestial bodies are believed to have been flung into space when their home galaxies collided.
Then again, it is possible that some of these stars were turned into wanderers by gravitational forces that compelled them to abandon their home and go on a joyride through space, researchers argue in the journal Science.
“The stars have been stripped from their parent galaxies by gravitational interactions – which we know happens from images of interacting galaxies – and flung out to large distances,” said astrophysicist Michael Zemcov.
The California Institute of Technology astronomers wish to study this diffuse glow in the universe in detail and hope to soon obtain further evidence indicating the existence of vagabond stars all around space.