[extropy-chat] ultra-compact dwarfs found lurking

[Damien Broderick]

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