What Is The Stars?

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Why, they’re luminous spheres of plasma held together by their own gravity.

Behold: NGC 290 – an extremely photogenic open cluster captured in 2006 by the Hubble Space Telescope. To wit:

Open clusters of stars are younger, contain few stars, and contain a much higher fraction of blue stars than do globular clusters of stars. NGC 290 lies about 200,000 light-years distant in a neighbouring galaxy called the Small Cloud of Magellan (SMC). The open cluster contains hundreds of stars and spans about 65 light years across. NGC 290 and other open clusters are good laboratories for studying how stars of different masses evolve, since all the open cluster’s stars were born at about the same time.

(ImageNASAESAHubble; Acknowledgement: E. Olzewski (U. Arizona))

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6 thoughts on “What Is The Stars?

  1. Slightly Bemused

    Beautiful! I only wish that the Mark 1 eyeball could resolve like this in a telescope :-)

    1. Liam Deliverance

      +1 Millie, well put, love ’em too

      200,000 light years away = 1,892,146,000,000,000,000 km or 1.8 Quintillion kilometers

      65 light years across = 614,900,000,000,000 km or 614.9 trillion kilometers

      Diameter of the earth = 12,742 km

      Number of Earths that would fit into 65 light years = 48,257,730,340.60594883063883220844 or 48.2 billion

      1. V

        Now seriously Liam
        Why do I need to know all that?

        Like what’s the point even talking about years in bundles of quintillions and trillions
        When the planet Earth will all be gone in a few decades, and us with it

        Like that’s just rubbing it in

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