Stellar Sorting in a Globular Cluster

[Waspie_Dwarf]

Hubble Yields Direct Proof of Stellar Sorting in a Globular Cluster

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided astronomers with the best observational evidence to date that globular clusters sort out stars according to their mass, governed by a gravitational billiard ball game between stars. Heavier stars slow down and sink to the cluster's core, while lighter stars pick up speed and move across the cluster to its periphery. This process, called "mass segregation," has long been suspected for globular star clusters, but has never before been directly seen in action.

A typical globular cluster contains several hundred thousand stars. Although the density of stars is very small in the outskirts of such stellar systems, the stellar density near the center can be more than 10,000 times higher than in the local vicinity of our Sun. If we lived in such a region of space, the night sky would be ablaze with 10,000 stars that would be closer to us than the nearest star to the Sun, Alpha Centauri, which is 4.3 light-years away (or approximately 215,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun).

Ground-Based Image Credit: Very Large Telescope/European Southern Observatory, R. Kotak and H. Boffin (ESO)

Hubble Image Credit: NASA, ESA and G. Meylan (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne)

Image Type: Astronomical/Illustration
STScI-PRC2006-33

Source: HubbleSite - Newsdesk

[Bella-Angelique]

I suppose that means that every galaxy has its own ring of life forming systems.

[ROGER]

If you are suggesting that all stars with a mass close to our own would form a circle , and that life would then develop only on these stars. I don't see where size similarity would effect life or the type of life to evolve.

But lets face it , we are all guessing.