A group of scientists has detected a stellar bridge connecting two galaxies in the Abell 3667 cluster, located 700 million light-years away. The structure, which measures one million light-years, is made up of stars that became "wandering" after extreme gravitational interactions.
This discovery is key to studying the dynamics of visible and dark matter in large top-tier systems and understanding how these enormous clusters evolve.
The stellar bridge and its origin
The observation emerged after combining 28 hours of data taken with the Dark Energy Camera at the Cerro Tololo Observatory, Chile. Astronomer Anthony Englert, leader of the study, stated that a structure like this had never been detected before in a nearby cluster.
The bridge is part of the so-called intracluster light (ICL), a diffuse glow caused by stars that were stripped from their original galaxies. This happened during the merger of two top-tier clusters about one billion years ago.
