Re: OT: Colinearity of Stars in Our Galaxy
- Posted by gimlet Feb 15, 2014
- 3286 views
At first I thought that the 2 outer stars were orbiting each other around the center of mass and the central star was resting at a neutral point between. The results seen, looking at the proper motion, killed that idea. So I am left with the problem of how/why are they aligned so closely. The regions I've looked at are not through the milky way, but mostly perpendicular. (i.e. 5,0,0 RA and 5,0,0 DEC)
Perhaps what you are seeing is a star stream. I would have thought that the stars were mostly independent (you say the triples are well separated). Do they have similar alignments? One would expect galaxy stars would be (more or less) randomly aligned. A star stream on the other hand would not be randomly aligned (common direction).
The other day I was at the Powerhouse and one of the exhibits was iron filings in a magnetic field. The pictures you usually see are nicely aligned to the lines of force - great visualisations. What I saw was something only a bit like that: a large clump of filings which tended to stick together not very well aligned in the small but in the large obviously constrained by the field.
