Twinkle

 Reading:

The Astrophysical Journal Volume 765 Number 1 Richard de Grijs et al. 2013 ApJ 765 4 doi:10.1088/0004-637X/765/1/4

GRAVITATIONAL CONUNDRUM? DYNAMICAL MASS SEGREGATION VERSUS DISRUPTION OF BINARY STARS IN DENSE STELLAR SYSTEMS

Richard de Grijs^1,2,6, Chengyuan Li^1,3, Yong Zheng^1,3,7, Licai Deng^4,5, Yi Hu⁴, M. B. N. Kouwenhoven¹, and James E. Wicker<sup>4


at the site  

 http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/765/1/4</sup>

and it dawns upon my muddled mind that I do not have a rich and vigorous account for the formation of binary stars, which formations are very, very numerous, especially in the cluster under study in the paper above. So I refer to:
THE FORMATION OF COMMON-ENVELOPE, PRE-MAIN-SEQUENCE BINARY STARS 
 http://www.phys.lsu.edu/astro/nap98/bf.final.html


After this, it seems that the pre-stellar gas clouds act like water drops with surface tension under the influence of another force pulling them apart. If so, the probabilities of such structures splitting into two is substantially greater than the probability of splitting into three or more pre-stellar gas clouds. It would seem from a preliminary view that the transform into stars is contemporary with the splitting into a binary; i.e., the gas clouds do not separate and then at some future date ignite into stars. It seems that ignition would be inhibited by the volume of gas... even though there exist massive stars... but the massive ones are the exception rather than the rule.

Drops of water......
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