Jan 14 1997
From The Space Library
Henry C. Ferguson, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, announced the discovery of stars residing outside of any defined galaxy. Scientists had long suspected that such stars existed, but Ferguson and his team were the first to confirm the theories. They did so using images captures by the HST, which revealed as many as 600 stars in the seemingly blank spaces among the Virgo cluster of galaxies, approximately 60 million light-years away from Earth. Ferguson suspected that many more stars-perhaps as many as 1 trillion Sun-like stars are adrift in the galaxies of Virgo. The astronomers theorized that galactic mergers, or the tidal forces of nearby galaxies, had displaced the stars from their home galaxies.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
