Table of Contents
What is the relationship between star clusters and star formation?
When stars are born they develop from large clouds of molecular gas. This means that they form in groups or clusters, since molecular clouds are composed of hundreds of solar masses of material. After the remnant gas is heated and blow away, the stars collect together by gravity.
What keeps a star cluster together?
the force of gravity that holds clusters together comes mostly from dark matter, making clusters an excellent way to study dark matter in the Universe.
What do star clusters tell us?
Star clusters are groups of hundreds to millions of stars that provide astronomers crucial insight into stellar evolution through comparisons of stars’ ages and compositions. “Star clusters form out of large interstellar regions of gas and dust called molecular clouds,” Aaron M.
How close together are stars in a cluster?
about 1 light year
The typical distance between stars in a globular cluster is about 1 light year, but at its core the separation between stars averages about a third of a light year—13 times closer than Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun.
What happens to stars in a cluster as it ages?
As a cluster ages, the mass of the main-sequence turnoff stars decreases. By determining the mass of the main-sequence turnoff stars, we get the age of the cluster. The cluster age equals the main-sequence lifetime of the turnoff stars.
What is the difference between a constellation and a star cluster?
Star clusters are groups of stars that are ‘connected’ by a significant gravitational force ands move around tougher as the galaxy rotates. However a constellation is a group of stars that appear to be related simply because of the view of them from the Earth.
What’s our star cluster called?
Ask Astro: What happened to the Sun’s original star cluster? At the core of NGC 6357 sits the open cluster Pismis 24. Our own Sun was born within such a cluster 4.6 billion years ago. Since then, it and its stellar siblings have dispersed throughout the galaxy, but astronomers are keen to hunt those siblings down.
What is the difference between a star cluster and a galaxy?
The difference is in scale. A star cluster is just a small group of stars bound together by their gravity. A galaxy is a very large collection of stars.
How is cluster age determined?
How do you determine a star cluster?
By placing the stars in a globular cluster on a Hertzprung-Russell diagram, astronomers can determine the cluster’s age by looking at the main sequence turnoff point and comparing it with models of stellar evolution. Q: The globular cluster NGC 6397 is 7,800 light-years away.
Is a star cluster bigger than a galaxy?
When comparing the two, a typical globular cluster might contain a mass of 100,000 Suns, whereas the Milky Way has nearly 1 trillion solar masses. In other words, the Milky Way Galaxy contains 10 million times more mass than a typical globular cluster.