Tag: spherical

Stellar Snowball

ryanLeave a comment
The closest star to the Earth, aside from the Sun, is Proxima Centauri, a small red dwarf star that is part of the Alpha Centauri system, roughly 4 light years away.  If you don’t know light years, the distance is a staggering 37,800,000,000,000 Km.  Beyond that our stellar neighbourhood fills in as you move 20 light years in any direction, and by 100 light years, there are dozens of stars around us.  This gives a stellar density of about 0.14 stars per cubic parsec (a parsec is about 3.26 light years), pretty normal in terms of the number of stars in a given...

Why do Galaxies look like that?

ryanLeave a comment
Why should a galaxy have bluish spiral arms dotted with red patches and dark lanes.  Why should it have a central region that is yellow and spherical rather than flat? Why are they flat to begin with? Because Galaxies are so huge, and made from hundreds of Billions of stars that change over the course of their lives, a galaxy shows the entire life cycle of a star in its own structure. Stars are born along spiral arms, where most of the thick dust and gas clouds are concentrated.  The dark dust lanes of spiral arms condense to form stars,...