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Old 02-March-2005, 03:17 PM
GOURDHEAD GOURDHEAD is offline
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Here is a story about early galaxy sizes and contents. If that much silicate was present, there must have been lotsa CHON, so earthlike planets must have been around much longer than I have previously thought. When stars form out of material that rich in "metals", do they behave differently from those formed from only hydrogen and helium?

Here is a story about star formation.
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For those inclined to oppose human meddling with the structure of the universe or the composition and configuration of objects and groups of objects within the universe, consider:
Whether there is a limit to the magnitude of a modulation of chaos below which order remains invariant? Or, is order but a fiction invented by perspectives applied over finite, however large, time intervals?
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Old 02-March-2005, 06:26 PM
Erimus Erimus is offline
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<<When stars form out of material that rich in "metals", do they behave differently from those formed from only hydrogen and helium?>>

Though I'm no expert, my understanding of star formation is that it does, in two ways:

1.) Metal-rich clouds radiate their heat more efficiently, making it easier for them to collapse to form stars.

2.) Metal-rich stars are cooler and larger for a given mass than metal-poor ones. Metals increase the "opacity" of a star's outer layers, making it less transparent to its own radiation, thus causing it to reach equilibrium at a larger size and cooler temperature--but at the same luminosity as a metal-poor star of the same mass. If our Sun were very metal-poor, it would probably have a spectral well into the F range, but it would be no more brighter.

There's a lot of material out there on stars like this (metal-poor stars that are "too dim" for their spectral type), which are known as subdwarfs.
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