Do you remember the Coyote? He was always doing something crazy. Well, Coyote loved to dance also. One night he went out into the dessert and he started to dance around. He chased his tail, jumping, and spinning— he just loved to dance. Coyote looked up at the sky and saw he stars flashing, twinkling and dancing across the sky. He thought how great it would be to dance with them. So he called up to them, “Good evening, Ladies. My, you sure are pretty tonight. Anybody care to dance.” Well, the stars all laughed. A little blue star said, “Did you hear that foolish Coyote? He wants to come up here and dance with us.” A red star said, ” Why, Coyote you wouldn’t last at all. We dance all night long.” Coyote answered back. “Oh, pretty ladies I’m a fine dancer, I would never get tired... we could waltz around all night long. Ladies, please let me dance with you.”
A star from the south felt sorry for him and called down for him to come up and dance with her. But she said that he had to remember that he could not stop because they had to dance all night long. He called back that he wouldn’t stop, “I’ll dance all night with you Pretty Star. “
Well, the star reached down as far as she could and Coyote reached up as far as he could. The moment they touched Coyote was whirled up into the sky and they began to dance and dance. They danced for a long time and Coyote started to lose his breath.
So he asked if they could just stop long enough for him to catch his breath. Star said, “Oh no, we dance all night. Coyote said “Okay,” and they continued to dance. But Coyote was getting so out of breath, he was just hanging on to the star. After a while he couldn’t even do that. He let go and he fell all the way back down to earth.
Some people say that where he fell, there is a big hole in the ground. Other people say the hole was so big it filled up with water and became a great big lake. Others say he burned up and left a bright streak across the sky. The next night, another Coyote wanted to dance with the stars. They called down “Don’t you remember what happened to your brother coyote?” But he replied “I’m a better dancer then him. Night after night those foolish coyotes tried to dance across the sky with the stars and they always fall, leaving streaks of light across the sky. If you go out at night and look up you just might be able to see one of those foolish Coyotes falling back to earth.
THE AMAZING UNIVERSE
by Frank Bifulco
Our Universe is an amazing place, Frank takes you on an intriguing and sometimes surprising journey of facts and information. Frank Bifulco RAC Advisory Committee
Cosmic Cornucopia Recent advances in astro imaging were made with the updated optics of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Spizter Space Telescope (SST). These state-of-the-art telescopes have shed new light (no pun intended) on evelopments with globular and open clusters. For starters, there is now some debate as to whether or not the largest globular cluster in the Milky Way, Omega Centauri, is the remnant of a dwarf galaxy which was disrupted and absorbed by the core of the Milky Way Galaxy.
The evidence for this assertion is not conclusive, but it would mesh with the powerful gravitational effects of the supermassive black holes at the center of the Milky Way and other galaxies. We know that galaxies of similar size do collide, so we can deduce that large galaxies and dwarf galaxies do also. Observations of globular M12 with the SST also indicate that this cluster is losing stars as it rotates around the galactic core of the Milky Way Galaxy. With 200,000 stars still remaining (down from over 1 million), M12 in Ophiuchus should have another 4.5 billion years left before it is totally stripped of all her stars. So don’t worry if you wait a few months to observe M12— it’ll still be there ! We also have new information on the density and brightness of globular clusters. Originally, it was thought that the density of globular clusters was lower than we now know and the brightness higher. In fact, density is higher but brightness is lower. This is because most of the stars in a globular cluster are older stars whose absolute magnitude would be less to an observer located in such a cluster. More stars have been found, but these older stars are less luminous. These new developments were made possible because of the ability to image clusters in different wavelengths of light, screening out the effects of gas and other variables.
Conversely, the Arches Cluster near the Milky Way core has a solar density 60,000 times that of our region of space mmediately adjacent to Earth. There are 100 superluminious young giant stars located within 1 light-year of one another— by comparison, we have 4 stars within about 4 light-years (the Sun and the Alpha Centauri system of 3 stars). This cluster is only a few million years old and is composed of very young stars that burn out quickly. Nighttime on planet in the Arches Cluster would have starlight equal to the illumination inside of an office building. Most globular custers, comprised of more but older stars, would give off the light equivalent of a few candles in a dark room. Thanks to in-depth examination of the Arches Cluster, it also appears that the upper limit for a star’s solar mass is about 150 suns. Studying globular clusters provides insightful information about the universe for the same reason that black holes do— they combine the internal thermonuclear dynamism of stellar activity with the gravitational effects of large solar objects. Just as black holes offer insight into the birth and death of stars and the universe, globular clusters are giving us new information on stars and galaxies, and gravitational interactions involving both.
In effect, globular clusters are the middle ground between individual stars and galaxies. In coming months and years, expect more details on the number of globular clusters in some of the galaxies within the Virgo Supercluster as well as more distant superlarge galaxies.