Sunday, August 16, 2015
Monday, August 3, 2015
Just a few thoughts....
I had a question: "How do super giant stars form?" No easy answer came to mind, it does seem to be a question that no one gives much thought to. But, think about it for a moment, if a gas cloud is gradually contracting, then at some point it will have at it's center, a star globe of about one solar mass. Well, that being the case, and since stars light up at that point, a stellar wind will begin blowing the extra gasses away. Meaning that the accretion process should halt star formation at about one solar mass.
Then it came to me, what if, instead of a star simply accreting from a gas cloud, it accreted from a cloud containing heavier elements? The heavier elements would sink to the core and prevent the star from fusing hydrogen, until the temperature at the surface of the core became hot enough. That would mean that accretion could continue way past one solar mass, depending on how big a non hydrogen core the star had. My guess is that the process is so sensitive to interference that, even a non-hydrogen core of a few meters would be enough to delay the onset of fusion, until the star became several solar masses larger. Finally, once the fusion process did get started, the non hydrogen core would be degraded by being bombarded with protons, until it transitioned to less stable elements or gasses which the turbulence could then carry away from the core.
Well, if true, this process has other implications. One being that giant and super giant stars would be relatively rare in the early universe , since helium was the only heavy element available, Because one solar mass stars are so stable that their lives are approximately 10 billion years, it takes too a long time before they throw off enough heavy elements to form the giants the universe needs to make the heavier elements and discharge them. But wait, the universe was much denser then and gas was in such great abundance, it is possible that early stars were forming heavier elements in these gas clouds by bombarding them with radiation. Also stars would have been in such great number and so close together, the opportunity for stars to grow into larger, shorter lived stars by the simple process of combining. For this purpose I'd assume that galaxies had not yet formed because there were no black holes in existence yet. Thus, stars were free to roam to wherever gravitational attractions might take them.
Well, that got me thinking about another facet of the big bang. The early formation of matter. Normally nature follows the path of least resistance, so why should it do otherwise even way back then? I'd say that after this point of pure energy began to expand and temperatures began to descend, energy would begin to transition to matter and my guess would be that quantum particles would be the first to form. These particles would then coalesce into photons, then the photons would form electrons, then the electrons would collide and form protons and neutrons. Since it takes one more electron to form a neutron than it does to form a proton, that suggests there's a statistical calculation that can be pursued, that just might throw some additional light on the early universe matters. I've read that as much as a quarter of the gas in the early universe was helium.
It comes through to me that what we're probably looking at is that everything is made of just one thing, that takes many different forms, depending on some laws we do not yet understand.
Then it came to me, what if, instead of a star simply accreting from a gas cloud, it accreted from a cloud containing heavier elements? The heavier elements would sink to the core and prevent the star from fusing hydrogen, until the temperature at the surface of the core became hot enough. That would mean that accretion could continue way past one solar mass, depending on how big a non hydrogen core the star had. My guess is that the process is so sensitive to interference that, even a non-hydrogen core of a few meters would be enough to delay the onset of fusion, until the star became several solar masses larger. Finally, once the fusion process did get started, the non hydrogen core would be degraded by being bombarded with protons, until it transitioned to less stable elements or gasses which the turbulence could then carry away from the core.
Well, if true, this process has other implications. One being that giant and super giant stars would be relatively rare in the early universe , since helium was the only heavy element available, Because one solar mass stars are so stable that their lives are approximately 10 billion years, it takes too a long time before they throw off enough heavy elements to form the giants the universe needs to make the heavier elements and discharge them. But wait, the universe was much denser then and gas was in such great abundance, it is possible that early stars were forming heavier elements in these gas clouds by bombarding them with radiation. Also stars would have been in such great number and so close together, the opportunity for stars to grow into larger, shorter lived stars by the simple process of combining. For this purpose I'd assume that galaxies had not yet formed because there were no black holes in existence yet. Thus, stars were free to roam to wherever gravitational attractions might take them.
Well, that got me thinking about another facet of the big bang. The early formation of matter. Normally nature follows the path of least resistance, so why should it do otherwise even way back then? I'd say that after this point of pure energy began to expand and temperatures began to descend, energy would begin to transition to matter and my guess would be that quantum particles would be the first to form. These particles would then coalesce into photons, then the photons would form electrons, then the electrons would collide and form protons and neutrons. Since it takes one more electron to form a neutron than it does to form a proton, that suggests there's a statistical calculation that can be pursued, that just might throw some additional light on the early universe matters. I've read that as much as a quarter of the gas in the early universe was helium.
It comes through to me that what we're probably looking at is that everything is made of just one thing, that takes many different forms, depending on some laws we do not yet understand.
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