the.com/star cluster
Stars that formed together and now awkwardly commit to staying close forever.
means A group of stars born from the same cloud of gas and dust, bound together by gravity and moving through space as one.
from A plain compound: 'star,' from Old English steorra, tracing back through Germanic roots to a very old Indo-European word for star that also gave Latin stella and Greek aster. 'Cluster' comes from Old English clyster, related to 'clot,' originally describing a bunch of things packed tightly together — grapes, bees, anything clinging in a mass. Put together, the term is modern astronomical shorthand, not an ancient coinage — scientists needed a plain word for what telescopes revealed: stars that clump, not by accident, but by shared birth and gravity's long memory.
- two types
- open clusters are loose, globular clusters are tightly packed
- globular age
- some are nearly as old as the universe itself
- shared birth
- all members formed from the same collapsing gas cloud
- slow breakup
- gravity from passing stars eventually pulls open clusters apart