
Stars memorize rebirth of our home galaxy - dnetesn
https://phys.org/news/2018-08-stars-rebirth-home-galaxy.html
======
Groxx
Yuck. That headline.

The article describes what they mean in a is considerably more understandable
way.

> _The history of the Milky Way is inscribed in the elemental composition of
> stars, because stars inherit the composition of the gas from which they are
> formed—in effect, stars "memorize" the element abundance in gas at the time
> they are formed._

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Fun aside: Given the relation between temperature and density ( _i.e._ hot gas
is less dense than cold gas and compressing gases heats them up), it takes a
large disturbance to coax interstellar gases to get dense enough to cause the
cascading accumulation that becomes a star.

Metals play a critical role in this process [1]. By radiating away heat, they
form the cool nuggets around which stellar material can accumulate. More metal
in a gas cloud means faster star formation. That, by reducing the accumulation
period before fusion blows away un-captured mass, produces smaller stars.

But what about before there were metals? The first generation of stars. Our
models imply, without any metals to catalyse formation, the stars would have
collapsed extraordinarily slowly. Fusion would have started very late, which
means lots of material would have had a chance to fall into the neighborhood.
The result? Truly massive short-lived stars, unlike anything our metallic
universe could produce.

Also, yes, terrible headline.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0006082](https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-
ph/0006082)

