#metallicity

Inorganic Chemist: Actually, boron, carbon, aluminum, silicon, arsenic, tellurium, and astatine are metalloids

Astronomer: Everything but hydrogen and helium are metals.

Physicist: all nonmetals become metallic under very high pressure and low temperature.

Most of the points they make are just fabricated. If they are this fucking STUPID AND SUSCEPTIBLE TO PROPAGANDA, AND ARE UNABLE TO COME TO THE CORRECT CONCLUSION, they must be so fucking stupid that.. they’re stupid and not useful so.. I’m not implying that anyone takes anything into their own hands.. but.. I’m not, my government will deal with them.

Considered one of the finest northern hemisphere globular clusters, Messier 3 contains 500,000 stars all crushed into 90 light years, when you consider there are around 60,000 stars within 100 light years of us, it gives you an idea, almost 10 times more stars packed into the same space, but far more towards the central region.

The cluster is 33,900 light years from Earth and far above the normal spiral plane of our galaxy, putting it in the halo area where few stars exist.

It's the archetypal Oosterhoff type I globular cluster, a cluster that's old but has high metallicity for a globular cluster, still only 3-4% of what our sun has.

It's position in Canes Venatici makes it fairly easy to see for those with binoculars in the north, but at 6.2 mag, it's just outside of most people's naked eye sight, although if you use averted vision (see through the side of your eyes) in a very dark location, then you may just glimpse a smudge (assuming you've already got very good eye sight).

Ask Ethan: Why Were The First Stars Much Larger Than Even Today's Biggest Ones?

“I do not understand why a star's metallicity has an impact on its size. Why? I am asking this because in one of your articles, you were saying that in the beginning of the universe, stars with mass almost 1000 [times] the sun's mass probably existed because they were almost 100% hydrogen and helium.”

There’s a bit of a puzzle in the Universe: the stars we form today are about 40% the mass of the Sun, on average, and the most massive one we’ve ever discovered is about 260 times the mass of our Sun. In the very early Universe, however, before any other, prior generations of stars formed, we expect the average stellar mass will be 10 times the Sun’s mass, with the largest stars reaching upwards of 1000 solar masses. If the only difference is the amount of heavy elements, then why, if metals help with cooling and enable stars to form more easily, would the first stars be biased towards higher masses? 

Hotter than Hell

There's Hot Jupiters, then there's HD 149026b, some call it Smertrios. The temperature of the Saturn sized giant is three times that of the hottest planet in our solar system (Venus), at a cool 1,425'c.

But with JWST observations now in, it's uncovered a slight mystery. Normally, the % of metals (more complex elements than hydrogen and helium) is lower the higher the mass, so the results of JWST were a little surprising, finding much larger concentrations of the more complex Carbon and Oxygen than would fit the expectation.

The star HD 149026 is an F type star, slightly larger in mass than our Sun, but the planet orbits very close in completing an entire year (full orbit) every 2.9 Earth days.

The composition of the planet has got scientists wondering if the contents of the accretion disk when the star was forming had much higher concentrations of heavier elements than would ordinarily be the case, and hints to the diverse range even amongst gas giants and specifically hot Jupiter typed planets.

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Population III Stars and the Elemental Gap

The first stars were thought to be colossal, made almost entirely of hydrogen with a small amount of helium, they were thought to live short but explosive lives, seeding our universe with more metallic stars (Pop ii) and leading to our own pop i stars, with all the diversity of elements we currently see.

The oldest stars in our own galaxy belong to those in globular clusters, some as old as 13 billion years old, these stars were thought to be the population ii stars born out of the original pop iii clusters, however, as poor in metals as they are, they still show significant amounts of elements that don't quite fit the theory.

Since JWST has been on the scene, the data seems to be stacking up that many early galaxies were also far more metal rich than expected, and so there is a gap, where did the early universe abundancy of elements come from ?

A team from the universities of Geneva (UNIGE) and Barcelona, and the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris (CNRS and Sorbonne University) believe they have a theoretical explanation for the gap, and with research into the elements that make up the stars within globular clusters, they believe they have found evidence that points towards the cause.

The team believe that the nature of these first population iii stars was that they burned far hotter than had previously been expected, and therefore produced different amounts of elements, thus making the early universe much more metal abundant than had been proposed.

It also calls into question the reliability of using metallicity as a pure measure of age.

The elements that exist in a star are collected from the nebula they are in, the assumption was pop iii stars were born in the big bang fusion state, while pop ii tended towards the exploding massive stars elements, albeit at very low levels (as time goes by, these elements increase owing to more and more supernova seeding the universe).

But what if those very first pop iii stars did far more, it would go some way to explain what JWST is seeing, and the evidence collected by the team from globular clusters would seem to point towards that explanation.

The above is based on the original assumptions, but isn't matching exactly with observation, and now JWST is really opening up to new possibilities.

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