Posted on 06/09/2015 8:38:48 PM PDT by BenLurkin
The case for NGC 2419 as a lonely globular wandering the cosmic void between the galaxies is a romantic and intriguing notion, and one you see repeated around the echo chamber that is the modern web. First observed by Sir William Herschel in 1788 and re-observed by his son John in 1833, the debate has swung back and forth as to whether NGC 2419 is a true globular or—as has been also suggested of the magnificent southern sky cluster Omega Centauri—the remnant of a dwarf spheroidal galaxy torn apart by our Milky Way. Lord Rosse also observed NGC 2419 with the 72-inch Leviathan of Parsonstown, and Harlow Shapley made a distance estimate of about 163,000 light years to NGC 2419 in 1922.
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Today, we know that NGC 2419 is about 270,000 light years from the Sun, and about 300,000 light years from the core of our galaxy. Think of this: we actually see NGC 2419 as it appeared back in the middle of the Pleistocene Epoch, a time when modern homo sapiens were still the new hipsters on the evolutionary scene of life on Earth. What’s more, photometric studies over the past decade suggest there is a true gravitational link between NGC 2419 and the Milky Way. This would mean at its current distance, NGC 2419 would orbit our galaxy once every 3 billion years, about 75% the age of the Earth itself.
This hands down makes NGC 2419 the distant of the more than 150 globular clusters known to orbit our galaxy.
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Mind not blown yet?
A 2014 study looking at extragalactic background light during a mission known as CIBER suggests that there may actually be more stars wandering the universe than are bound to galaxies…
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
Kool
bump
The general conclusion to be derived from the above results seems to be that the sun is a member of a cluster or stars, possibly distributed in the form of a ring, and that outside this ring, at a much greater distance from us than the stars of the solar cluster, lies a considerably richer ring-shaped cluster, the light of which, reduced to nebulosity by immensity of distance, produces the Milky Way gleam of our midnight skies.
ASTRONOMY by Agnes M. Clerke, The Concise Knowledge Library, 1898.
Mind blown!
William Herschel determined the approximate shape and rough size of the Milky Way in 1781.
In 1920, the famous Shapely-Curtis debate took place, with Shapely arguing that Herschel’s Milky Way was the universe, and spiral nebulas like Andromeda were just clusters within it. Curtis argued that each of spiral nebulas was an “island universe” unto itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Debate_%28astronomy%29
Edwin Hubble settled the debate in 1924 when he observed a Cepheid variable in the Andromeda Galaxy, using the 100 inch Hooker Telescope and was able to apply Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s law to show that Andromeda was about one million light years from the sun, decisively confirming Curtis \’s
position.
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