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That's a fascinating thought actually. Why does a mass of gas always have to materialize into a solar system? Why not into one or more planets, if the amount is
by misja111 3y ago
That's a fascinating thought actually. Why does a mass of gas always have to materialize into a solar system? Why not into one or more planets, if the amount is too low? Or also the other way around: what if there is so much gas that it's too much to fit into a single star, what would it materialize into then? A twin star solar system, or something else?
- samus 3y agoThere is no "too much". The result would simply be a larger star.
- dougmwne 3y agoThere is a theorized “Eddington Limit” that stars can only grow to a certain mass before the power of their fusion reactions counterbalance gravity and they blow off additional matter instead of absorbing it. It’s approximately a few hundred solar masses.
- liotier 3y agoHow does the Eddington Limit relate to black hole formation ? Does it means that accretion is slow until the star's matter has finished fusing ?
- samus 3y agoBlack holes form when there is insufficient force to counter accretion and subsequent compression by gravity. There are a few forces that act as a counter: - thermally generated pressure as a result of exothermic reactions (like nuclear fusion), - Coulomb pressure (atomic nuclei opposing each other), or - quantum-mechanical degeneracy pressure (keeps white and brown dwarfs and neutron stars from collapsing)
- andrewflnr 3y agoIf you have a really big gas cloud I think you just get multiple stars, not particularly in a "solar system". There are some telescope images of stellar nurseries where you can see several young stars in the same gas cloud.
- dotancohen 3y agoYou can see the Pleiades with the naked eye.
- ngcc_hk 3y agoSurprise so many uncertainties of the age and even distance of them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades
- dotancohen 3y agoMost of the distance measurements are within a percent of each other, except for a single survey with is 10% off all the others. That is not such a large uncertainty as to be of significant note.