January 19, 2002
The light from the farthest visible stars set out on its journey long before your first birthday.
Stars Without Galaxies
Birthday · January 19, 2002
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
Ready to give.
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APOD published January 19, 2002. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Galaxies are made up of stars, but are all stars found within galaxies? Using the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers exploring the Virgo Cluster of galaxies have found about 600 red giant stars adrift in intergalactic space. Above is an artist's vision of the sky from a hypothetical planet of such a lonely sun. The night sky on a world orbiting an intergalactic star would be a stark contrast to Earth's - which features a spectacle of stars, all members of our own Milky Way Galaxy. As suggested by the illustration, a setting red sun would leave behind a dark sky flecked only with faint, fuzzy, apparitions of Virgo Cluster galaxies. Possibly ejected from their home galaxies during galaxy-galaxy collisions, these isolated suns may well represent part of a large, previously unseen stellar population, filling the space between Virgo Cluster galaxies.