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Andrea Gianopoulos, 4 Jan. 2023, NASA.

Excerpt:

>In giant clusters of hundreds or thousands of galaxies, innumerable stars wander among the galaxies like lost souls, emitting a ghostly haze of light. These stars are not gravitationally tied to any one galaxy in a cluster.

>The nagging question for astronomers has been: how did the stars get so scattered throughout the cluster in the first place?

>A recent infrared survey from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which looked for this so-called "intracluster light," sheds new light on the mystery.

>The new Hubble observations suggest that these stars have been wandering around for billions of years, and are not a product of more recent dynamical activity inside a galaxy cluster that would strip them out of normal galaxies.

>The survey included 10 galaxy clusters as far away as nearly 10 billion light-years. These measurements must be made from space because the faint intracluster light is 10,000 times dimmer than the night sky as seen from the ground.

>The survey reveals that the fraction of the intracluster light relative to the total light in the cluster remains constant, looking over billions of years back into time.

>"This means that these stars were already homeless in the early stages of the cluster's formation," said James Jee of Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.

Nature, 4 Jan. 2023, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05396-4

they just like me, fr.

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I wonder if this kind of star would be able to have planets, or that the same force that swung them out of their galaxy also kicked out their planets. Imagine a habitable planet orbiting one of these stars, forever out of reach of other stars. Perhaps it could be peaceful and stable, no annoying supernovae nearby to destroy you

And completely black night sky, at least to an eye comparable to human's. Maybe a smudge of the closest galaxy, and other planets in the system.

The title reads like King Crimson lyrics.

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Would the night sky on a world orbiting such a star be fundamentally different? It would be mostly black, wouldn’t it?

Edit: Copied text from the link below:

>They could see the nebulae, beautiful and distant and beckoning, and could tell that those faraway galaxies were composed of suns, other stars like Thrial, and even guess that some of those suns too might have planets round them… but they looked in vain for stars anywhere near their own.

>The sky was full of darkness. There were planets and moons and the tiny feathery whorls of the dim nebulae, and they had themselves filled it with junk and traffic and emblems of a thousand different languages, but they could not create the skies of a planet within a galaxy, and they could not ever hope, within any frame of likelihood they could envisage existing, to travel to anywhere beyond their own system, or the everywhere-meaningless gulf of space surrounding their isolated and freakish star.

>For a distance that was never less than a million light years in any direction around it, Thrial-for all its flamboyant dispersion of vivifying power and its richly fertile crop of children planets-was an orphan.

This is a fictional account of such a situation from the book Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks.

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Starless and bible black

I dunno man, in the absence of planets if you're close to a wandering star, there would be no day or night, only the light of the big ass star right next to you. If you were in interstellar space, it'd probably be pretty dark but we can see distant clusters of galaxies from earth with the naked eye, magelleanic clouds spring to mind... Good questions though!

They’re going to find their way to San Francisco

I believe the proper terminology is unhoused stars now.

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