Arent there like five stars in the system? Is that the biggest or are there ones with twenty or bigger?
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So it is a five-star system (a quintuple star)
In any case, Castor (alpha Geminorum) is known to be a sextuple star system (six stars).
Why did the cloud collapse and form so many stars instead of only one giant star? Ask Mr. Jeans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hopwo…
Working with Eddington, he established that lots of factors will influence how a gas and dust nebula will collapse and form one or many stars. One of the criteria used, mathematically, to describe the collapse, is called "Jeans' limit" and another is called "Jeans' length".
Today, they have been combined in a model called "Jeans instability"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeans_insta…
A very incomplete summary would go like this: As the nebula collapses, there is a loss of gravitational potential (as more mass falls towards the nebula's barycentre), increased friction and increased pressure in the gas. All these become heat which must escape. Depending how much dust there is (and how opaque it is to infrared light -- the heat), the heat may prevent the full collapse of the cloud or break up the initial collapse into many smaller centres of collapse.
Add to that any overall movement in the vectorial addition of all the random movement of particles, and you may get eddies that will determine the final number of stars that will form from the nebula (and the overall spin of each system).
In very large nebulae, the difference can be shown with these examples:
the original nebulae were mostly hydrogen and helium (the very first stars from the original gas in the universe): very transparent to heat: the collapse resulted in very regular globular clusters, like M-12.
More recent collapses are far more affected by the presence of "pollutants" (elements other than hydrogen and helium) and so will form less regular "open clusters" (like the Pleiades, M-45).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_92
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_45
In any case, Castor (alpha Geminorum) is known to be a sextuple star system (six stars).
Why did the cloud collapse and form so many stars instead of only one giant star? Ask Mr. Jeans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hopwo…
Working with Eddington, he established that lots of factors will influence how a gas and dust nebula will collapse and form one or many stars. One of the criteria used, mathematically, to describe the collapse, is called "Jeans' limit" and another is called "Jeans' length".
Today, they have been combined in a model called "Jeans instability"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeans_insta…
A very incomplete summary would go like this: As the nebula collapses, there is a loss of gravitational potential (as more mass falls towards the nebula's barycentre), increased friction and increased pressure in the gas. All these become heat which must escape. Depending how much dust there is (and how opaque it is to infrared light -- the heat), the heat may prevent the full collapse of the cloud or break up the initial collapse into many smaller centres of collapse.
Add to that any overall movement in the vectorial addition of all the random movement of particles, and you may get eddies that will determine the final number of stars that will form from the nebula (and the overall spin of each system).
In very large nebulae, the difference can be shown with these examples:
the original nebulae were mostly hydrogen and helium (the very first stars from the original gas in the universe): very transparent to heat: the collapse resulted in very regular globular clusters, like M-12.
More recent collapses are far more affected by the presence of "pollutants" (elements other than hydrogen and helium) and so will form less regular "open clusters" (like the Pleiades, M-45).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_92
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_45