by MarkBour » Wed Nov 01, 2017 7:44 pm
How fortunate it is that astrophysics works out this way. If you have a cloud of mostly hydrogen, it might collapse under the force of gravity. But it doesn't just compact. Instead, it starts a vigorous reaction, that makes a whole lot of materials that it then sends back out to waft on the interstellar winds. And lots of alchemy in it produces elements that weren't present in the initial cloud. And so we have Thor's Helmet.
Perhaps I'm a bit of a simpleton that I find this marvelous. When I was young, I thought it would be a bad idea to get near the Sun because it was very massive, and the gravity would pull you in to burn up and die. I still realize that it's a bad idea and you will die, but I now see that it's not just a one-way process, it's a marvelous sort of "respiration". And, as many have pointed out many times before in this forum, without stars and this process, the Earth would not be here and we would not be here.
How fortunate it is that astrophysics works out this way. If you have a cloud of mostly hydrogen, it might collapse under the force of gravity. But it doesn't just compact. Instead, it starts a vigorous reaction, that makes a whole lot of materials that it then sends back out to waft on the interstellar winds. And lots of alchemy in it produces elements that weren't present in the initial cloud. And so we have Thor's Helmet.
Perhaps I'm a bit of a simpleton that I find this marvelous. When I was young, I thought it would be a bad idea to get near the Sun because it was very massive, and the gravity would pull you in to burn up and die. I still realize that it's a bad idea and you will die, but I now see that it's not just a one-way process, it's a marvelous sort of "respiration". And, as many have pointed out many times before in this forum, without stars and this process, the Earth would not be here and we would not be here.