There are five examples of a new class of stellar system. They're not a lot of things and only exist in isolated areas.
The new stellar systems contain only young, blue stars, which are distributed in an irregular pattern, and seem to exist in surprising isolation from any potential parent galaxies.
The stellar systems, which appear through a telescope as blue blobs and are about the size of tiny dwarf galaxies, are located within the relatively nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. It is difficult to identify the origin of the five systems because they are separated from any potential parent galaxies.
The Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy's Elizabeth Adams compiled a catalog of nearby gas clouds and provided a list of potential sites of new galaxies. The research groups started looking for stars that could be associated with the gas clouds after the catalog was published.
The gas clouds were thought to be associated with our own galaxy, but when the first collection of stars, called SECCO1, was discovered, they turned out to be in a different part of the sky.
Michael Jones is the lead author of a study that describes the new stellar systems. The findings were presented by Jones and Sand at the American Astronomical Society meeting.
Jones said it was a lesson in the unforeseen. You might find something else very interesting when you are looking for things.
The team obtained their observations from a number of telescopes. A companion paper focusing on the data from the Very Large Telescope has been submitted by the study co-author.
The team found out that most of the stars in the system are very young and have very little hydrogen gas. This is significant because star formation begins with atomic hydrogen gas and ends with dense clouds of hydrogen gas before forming into stars.
Most of the systems don't have atomic gas, but that doesn't mean there isn't something else. There must be some gas in the stars. These systems must have lost their gas recently because of the existence of mostly young stars.
There was a lack of older stars in the systems. Older stars are referred to as being red and dead.
Old red stars are usually the last ones left to live because of their lower mass. They are dead because they don't have any more gas. The blue stars are like an Oasis in the Desert.
New stellar systems are abundant in metals.
Jones said that metals are any element heavier than hegth. The stellar systems formed from gas that was stripped from a big galaxy because how metals are built up is by many repeated episodes of star formation.
There are two ways gas can be removed from a universe. When two big galaxies pass by each other, gas and stars are torn away.
Ram pressure stripping is the other.
Jones said it was like if you belly flopped into a pool. A cluster full of hot gas causes a galaxy belly to flop into it. That's the mechanism that we believe is being used to create these objects.
In order for the blue blobs to be as isolated as they are, they must have been moving very quickly, and the speed of tidal stripping is low compared to ram pressure stripping.
One day, these systems are expected to split into individual clusters of stars and spread across the larger galaxy cluster.
The story of recycling of gas and stars in the universe is fed by what researchers have learned. The belly flopping process is thought to change a lot of spiral galaxies into elliptical galaxies, so learning more about the general process will teach us more about galaxy formation.
More information: Michael G. Jones et al, Young, blue, and isolated stellar systems in the Virgo Cluster. II. A new class of stellar system. arXiv:2205.01695v1 [astro-ph.GA], arxiv.org/abs/2205.01695
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