Starship Asterisk*

I was just reading todays explanatinon of Picture of the day and read the following:
Gravitational tides from the close encounter have ripped away at their stars, gas, and dust.

Now if stars can be "ripped" away from a galaxy then there MUST be some leftovers.

What I mean is that can these turbulent events leave stars which donot belong to any galaxy?

Also are their just lone stars floating around in space?

Cheers!
Aditya

Yup, gravitational interactions between galaxies will often eject some portion of their stars completely from either system. So yes, somewhere out there in the lonely dark are orphaned stars, perhaps with planets of their own.

How strange it would seem to us to be a member of a sentient race living on a planet of such a star. The night sky would be awfully bleak and dark.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archiv ... es/1997/02

Indeed in clusters you get quite a lot of stars that float between the galaxies, not bound to any particular galaxy. They form what is known as the intracluster light.

Some of the stars in the cluster may even have formed out there, but most probably have been thrown out of galaxies during mergers such as this.

There are alot of stars that don't belong to any galaxy(the so called " stellar outcasts"). They are ussualy left like that after gravitational interactions between galaxies. Qev I think that it wouldn't be strange at all to live on such a planet. I mean it may seem strange to us ,but at the same time it'd seem strange to them to live on a planet like ours

The explanation on the Markarian's Eyes picture, also states this "crowded region of the universe also includes many more distant background galaxies."

I'm not a science guy and just enjoy seeing the pictures and maybe picking up a little knowledge. So could someone educate me on the other images in the picture please? While certainly I can make out smaller galaxies and at 6oclock it looks like probably a foreground Star from our galaxy due to diffraction spikes....what are all those other little pinpoints of light? Would all those faint dots be galaxies or an individual star? or a combination? Simply amazing......

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070608.html
For those that missed it, here's the link

BMAONE23 wrote:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070608.html
For those that missed it, here's the link

Thanks.