Saturday, August 26, 2006

Screw Pluto (ignore previous post)

Although it's great to see Pluto dominating International newspapers, and generating so much interest amongst the general public (myself included), it really is kind of useless news. Yes, it affects people's funding, and yes, textbooks will have to be changed. At the end of the day, the whole Pluto thing boils down to semantics. There is no new science.

What is far more important, and what is a real discovery is the fact that not all stars in globular clusters are of the same age. Globular clusters are just spherically shaped groups of stars that orbit the core of a galaxy. It was originally thought that globular clusters were some of the earliest objects accreted in a newly formed galaxy, and were the same age. The new research clearly shows a variation in the age of stars within a cluster. In short, everything I know is wrong.

Globular clusters are sometimes useful in determining the Age of the Universe, but these new results probably will not affect the accepted values for the age of the things by too much.

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