During the survey of gas clouds, scientists discovered 5 unusual blue spots in the Virgo galaxy cluster.
According to Space, research indicates that these blue spots are actually young blue stars. What is unusual is that these stars are completely isolated from their parent galaxies, arranged in a strange pattern.
Based on these details, researchers believe they have discovered a new type of star system: a collection of stars with strong gravitational forces, which is not entirely a galaxy but also not any known type of star cluster.
This image taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows the strange blue spots in the sky, surrounded by smaller, tiny material spots that also emit blue or white light – (Photo: HUBBLE/NASA)
Even more intriguingly, the colored spots were found to have little atomic hydrogen gas, a crucial component in star formation. This is completely puzzling since they are young stars, seemingly just emerging from a stellar nursery.
The research team, led by astronomer Michael Jones from the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona, USA, has recorded the presence of heavy metals in the colored spots.
This suggests that at some stage in the evolution of the galaxy, something may have pulled a cloud of gas out of the galaxy; or the galaxy itself may have expelled a clump of material. These stars formed within that “defector” material.
Astronomers suspect that over time, the stars in each strange blue spot will separate into smaller star clusters and spread out.
This discovery was presented at the 240th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California.
