University of Arizona astronomers have discovered strange ‘blue blobs’ in the Virgo galaxy cluster that may be an entirely new type of star system. These five peculiarities are roughly the size of tiny dwarf galaxies in the Virgo galaxy cluster and are separated from any potential parent galaxies by over 300,000 light years in some cases.
Astronomers found the new systems after a research group compiled a catalog of nearby gas clouds that were thought to be associated with our own galaxy. SECCO1 happened to be one of the very strange ‘blue blobs’, which typically means that the stars in the system are very young and contain very little atomic hydrogen gas. This combination of blue stars and lack of gas was quite mysterious as was a lack of older stars in the systems. It may be a while until Voyager 2 reaches any of these though, as it’s just over 11.6 billion miles from Earth.
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It’s a lesson in the unexpected. When you’re looking for things, you’re not necessarily going to find the thing you’re looking for, but you might find something else very interesting. We observed that most of the systems lack atomic gas, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t molecular gas. In fact, there must be some molecular gas because they are still forming stars. The existence of mostly young stars and little gas signals that these systems must have lost their gas recently,” said Michael Jones, a postdoctoral fellow in the UArizona Steward Observatory.
