from "the big bang" was Re: Re: M53, a glob I seldom see

From: Richard Crisp (rdcrisp@No-Spam)
Date: Mon Apr 21 2003 - 19:48:27 MST

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    Here is some more on the blue stars in globs etc.

    The book "The Big Bang" by Joseph Silk of Oxford, has an interesting tid bit about Globs and the blue stars. I quote from page 320 of the third edition:

    "If the processes of sweeping and evaporation do not entirely account
    for the extremely small amounts of gas that we observe in clusters, a
    third process should suffice. Globular clusters contain many luminous
    blue stars. These hot stars generally have exhausted the hydrogen in
    their cores and have evolved to an advanced stage, at which the
    principal nuclear fuel is helium. The blue stars ionize and heat any
    gas present. When a gas atom is ionized, it will be moving so rapidly
    that the weak gravitational attraction of the cluster cannot retain
    it, and the gas is driven away in a continuous wind. A similar
    process takes place in the outer layers of the sun, which continually
    drive off the corona in the form of the Solar wind."



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