Going Deep in Virgo

[FLO]

Astronomers have known for years that isolated stars and planetary nebulae roam the vast expanses of "empty" space within galaxy clusters. But what else populates these lonely depths, and why were these objects marooned from their parent galaxies?

To find out, an international team of 13 astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to stare for 25 hours at a relatively barren patch of space near the center of the Virgo Cluster. This vast assemblage contains more than 1,000 known galaxies and is centered about 55 million light-years from Earth, making it the largest galaxy cluster in the local universe. The ACS image covered an area of sky about 1 percent the size of the full Moon. Known as the Virgo IntraCluster Stars (VICS) project, it is one of the deepest Hubble images ever taken.

The Virgo Deep Field (VICS) shows a relatively "empty" region of the Virgo Cluster. Most of the objects in the image are galaxies much farther than Virgo's 55-million-light-year distance. But some of the objects are stars, star clusters, and small galaxies within the cluster. The field is 3.36 by 3.36 arcminutes, about the angular size of a grain of sand held at arm's length. Courtesy B. Williams / R. Ciardullo / P. Durrell.

In its preliminary analysis, announced earlier this month at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C., the team discovered thousands of intracluster stars, four globular clusters, and a dwarf galaxy. And as team leader Robin Ciardullo (Penn State University) points out, "We've really only started."

http://skyandtelescope.com/news/article_1672_1.asp

[The Warthog]

I've slways thought that inter galactic stars are quite a concept. They must exist, and is there any reason they couldn't support life? Imagine the vew! Nothing but DSOs...

[Mick.G.]

It would be a tragic shame if NASA cant get Hubble repaired in time!

[radioactive]

if memory serves me right Virgo was the area some British astronomers discovered the first Dark matter Galaxy only within the last few months