Universality of satellites in the breakup of a stretched fluid bridge

A slowly stretched fluid bridge is destined to break, leaving behind a satellite droplet. Combining experiments and one-dimensional simulations, the size of this droplet is shown to be highly reproducible. It is demonstrated to follow a simple formula depending only on the normalized volume of the bridge and the Weber number, so by stretching the bridge faster or increasing its volume the droplet size can be dramatically increased. The robustness of the satellite size is revealed to be due to an underlying universal dynamical solution.