clusters
catdynamics | January 7, 2013On the Blues and the Lifestyles and Fates of the Hottest Stars as they Cluster in the Heavens: or, why aging gracefully depends on your lifestyle and environment...
The Stellar Dynamical Clock
- is a Nature paper that came out in the Christmas double issue, always my favourite and very good value, might I add.
This paper is from a long term collaboration lead by Prof. Francesco Ferraro which over many cycles has built up a systematic sample of Hubble Space Telescope images of Galactic Globular Clusters, focusing, in partiular, on the blue and UV emitters in the dense cores of clusters, but…
esiegel | August 27, 2012"You must learn to talk clearly. The jargon of scientific terminology which rolls off your tongues is mental garbage." -Martin H. Fischer
I've always thought that the Universe is absolutely amazing; that everything from the tiniest indivisible particles all the way up to the largest structures and superstructures making up the Universe has an amazing story to tell, if only we can figure out its secrets.
Image credit: Boylan-Kolchin et al. (2009) for the Millenium-II simulation; MPA Garching.
When I first learned some of them for myself, I was a graduate student, immersed in the minutiae and…
esiegel | May 20, 2008Some of you who've been following astronomy for awhile might remember this report, where a group of astronomers reported finding a giant "void" in the Universe.
What is a void? Well, galaxies are distributed pretty randomly, but because of gravity, they cluster together. A small example is our local group which looks like this,
and a larger example is the Virgo cluster, which is about 1,000 times as massive as our local group, and looks like this:
Well, a void is the opposite of a cluster, where you have a large volume of space that's simply empty of galaxies and matter. This press release…