Cosmic Blue Blobs Discovered (Oldish news)

[mickw]

Brilliant blue blobs weighing tens of thousands of solar masses have been found lurking in the seemingly barren expanse of intergalactic space. The "eyes" of the Hubble Space Telescope resolved the objects, which appear to be clusters of stars born in the swirls and eddies of a galactic smashup some 200 million years ago.

The mysterious star clusters are considered orphaned, as they don't belong to any particular galaxy. Instead, they are clumped together into a structure called Arp's Loop along a wispy bridge of gas stretched like taffy between three colliding galaxies — M81, M82 and NGC 3077. These galaxies are located about 12 million light-years from us in the constellation Ursa Major.

More: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080108-aas-blue-blobs.html