Thousands of globular star clusters scattered between galaxies (earthsky.org)

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By EarthSky in Space | December 6, 2018

Peering into the heart of the giant Coma cluster of galaxies, the Hubble Space Telescope captured a whopping 22,426 globular star clusters scattered among the Coma cluster’s 1,000 galaxies.

Our Milky Way galaxy’s globular star clusters are its oldest inhabitants. These clusters lie not in the flat plane of our galaxy, but instead are gravitationally bound to our galaxy in a great sphere centered on the galaxy’s center. These clusters are thought to have been left behind when a cloud of primordial gas and dust flattened out to make our spiral Milky Way. Today, amateur astronomers love to peer toward globular clusters because they’re beautiful and symmetrical, like big cosmic dandelions gone to seed (except the “seeds” are stars). We tend to think of globular clusters as bound to our Milky Way galaxy or other galaxies. So it’s surprising to hear of globular clusters scattered between galaxies in the Coma galaxy cluster, some 300 million light-years away.

A survey with the Hubble Space Telescope revealed the globular clusters in the Coma galaxy cluster. This cluster holds over 1,000 galaxies. In a paper published November 9, 2018, in the peer-reviewed Astrophysical Journal, astronomers reported on finding the clusters and said they can now use this globular cluster field to map the distribution of matter and dark matter in the Coma galaxy cluster.

Let’s go back for a minute, to our Milky Way’s globular clusters. About 150 globular clusters orbit our Milky Way. NASA recently compared them to:

… bees buzzing around a hive. They are the earliest homesteaders of our galaxy, containing the universe’s oldest known stars.

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more: https://earthsky.org/space/globular-star-clusters-coma-galaxy-cluster-hubble