Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2013 18:25:09 -0500
From: mark <whitroth at 5-cent.us>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: [WSFA] The Milky =?UTF-8?B?V2F54oCZcyBNeXN0ZXJ5IENsb3Vk?=
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

Ok, who stole the stars?

Excerpt:
[T]here's the case of G0.253+0.016, and suddenly things get more
complicated. G0.253+0.016, which sits near the Milky Way's center, is
just the sort of cloud that should be manufacturing stars like crazy.
It's made of the right stuff, and it's plenty dense enough =C3=A2=C2=80=C2=
=94 some 25
times denser than the nearby cloud known as the Orion Nebula, where
astronomers have spotted hundreds of young stars in various stages of
emerging from the interstellar haze.

But G0.253+0.016 appears to have churned out only a handful of small
stars - about 45 times fewer than the time-honored theory would have
predicted. In a burst of J. Conan Doyle-esque inspiration, Caltech
astronomers, who have been puzzling over this cosmic oddball, have
dubbed it "The Mystery of the Curiously Dense Cloud."
--- end excerpt ---

<http://science.time.com/2013/01/30/the-milky-ways-mystery-cloud/>

         mark

--
We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would
clip the wings of the American Eagle in order to feather their own
nests. - Franklin Delano Roosevelt