An awesome sight. My question is this; how dense is the gas and dust that make up the clouds surrounding the triplet? If a space traveler were going through would he be aware of the cosmic dust and gas surrounding him?
![Confused :?](./images/smilies/icon_confused.gif)
Orin
Honestly I'm not certain how the density of such clouds is measured. If I had to guess, I'd say probably by how transparent the clouds are to various wavelengths of light (including infrared and radio).orin stepanek wrote:Thanks Qev; but how can this be measured? Most of these actually block out starlight from behind them. Nice link Harry.
Orin
I daresay in actual star-forming areas of these clouds, the densities increase greatly as gravitational attraction pulls the surrounding gases in. The 100 particles/cc number was basically just the line above which most astronomers consider a gas cloud 'dense'; they can obviously be denser than this! But outside of the regions where stars or other bodies are actually forming, the gas density is going to be extremely low compared to Earth's atmosphere.orin stepanek wrote:How can stars form from such rarefied conditions? I would suspect that enough stellar mater would be needed for gravitational attraction to coalesce these gasses into blazing stars. I would suspect these gasses and dust to be of higher particle count. Realizing of course that through the vast voids that a lot of gas would be present even at these rarefied conditions.
Orin
The Sun’s radiant energy and protons in the solar wind (SW) come from the collapsed supernova core, a neutron star (NS), on which the Sun formed. The cradle (Figs. 9-12) indicates that the energy of each neutron in the Sun’s central NS exceeds that of a free neutron by @ 10-22 MeV (Figs. 13-15) Solar luminosity and the flux of solar-wind protons are generated by a series of reactions (Fig. 16): a) escape of neutrons from the central NS, b) decay of free neutrons or their capture by other nuclides, c) fusion and upward migration of H+ through material that accreted on the NS, and d) escape of H+ in the SW. An example might be:
a) The escape of neutrons from the NS, <1n> –> 1n + 10-22 MeV
b) The decay of free neutrons, 1n –> 1H+ + e- + nanti + 0.78 MeV
c) Fusion of hydrogen, 4 1H+ + 2 e- –> 4He++ + 2 n + 26.73 MeV
d) Some H+ reaches the surface and departs in the solar wind
Reactions like a) and b) produce part of the Sun’s radiant energy and perhaps the luminosity of isolated neutron stars25. Note that reaction a) alone may release more energy per nucleon than is released by the sum of reactions b) and c), the decay or capture of neutrons plus H-fusion. The well-established Solar Neutrino Puzzle26 confirms that reaction c) generates only part of the Sun’s total luminosity. Most 1H+ from b) is consumed by H-fusion, but the anomalous abundance of H (See Fig.
shows that 1H+ also leaks from the interior, selectively carrying lighter nuclides to the solar surface (See Fig. 6) before departing in the solar wind at an emission rate of about 2.7 x 1043 1H/yr. Homochirality in living creatures26 was likely initiated by circularly polarized light (CPL) from the Sun’s early NS. Their fate and climate changes of planets27 may depend on the half-life of this massive nucleus at the Sun’s core.