[extropy-chat] ultra-compact dwarfs found lurking
Damien Broderick
thespike at satx.rr.com
Sat Apr 3 18:37:31 UTC 2004
At 10:05 AM 4/3/2004 -0800, Robert wrote:
> > "Tens of millions of stars are squashed into what is a tiny volume by
> > galaxy standards," the observatory said in a statement.
>If just a few of the
>stars start running into each other and producing a black hole
>that eats other stars the whole thing could go "poof" in a very
>short period of time.
I've never understood this idea. If you have a standard binary system, it's
effectively as massive (in its impact on stars at a decent distance) as a
stellar hole that's eaten a neighboring star, surely? It's not as if
collapsed stars go around *prowling* for other stars to eat, or their
terrible force field reaches out and drags in distant objects... well, no
more than any other large stellar mass. Is it not so?
What interested me about the UCDs is that the stars seem to average about a
tenth of the distance from each other as in our neck of the woods.
(Counting on my fingers again.) That has to be an interesting place if life
starts up there. But really I was hinting at... a possible history of...
*cosmic shepherding*...)
Damien Broderick
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