KITP: Y He and tilts

monday, again, already?
we get more fresh blood, and contemplate new topics

some interesting preprints out there on astro-ph:

the Bologna group has hi-res spectroscopy of old LMC clusters, and they see the dreaded Na-O anticorrelation there also! ref

Aargh, there is no escape...

the Sweigart and collaborators have an interesting letter doing combination log(g) and photometry of EHB stars in M3.
They say no helium enrichment ref

PS: hmmmmm - so, what happens if stars with higher Y lose more mass on the RGB?
Could there be a conspiracy to come out at near constant L?

Aargh!
Ok, that would actually make things a lot simpler in many ways, but, then what is going on with the colours - how can more metal rich stars be bluer?
It will be a real bummer if the whole excitement is caused by some crummy non-LTE effect, and the abundances are all off, or if there is some issue with line blanketing and the colour-effective metallicity inferences are all messed up.

This needs to be sorted. Pronto.

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Regarding star and galaxy formation, relative to conserving angular momentum, cosmic plasma hypothesizes that magnetic pinching is the process whereby stars and likely planets are condensed out of large, fairly rarefied volumes of plasma flows. No worry about what to do with the rotational inertia of gas far from the center. Keep in mind how weak gravity is compared to electromagnetic fields in space, and you can observe why a galactic disk rotates more like a condensed matter disk (similar angular velocity for objects near or far from the center). Gravity does a poor job at trying to explain that! Electric fields (created from electrons moving in large magnetic fields, or CURRENTS)in space and plasmas at large scale (they scale up nicely) are routinely not taught or worse, discouraged and ignored subjects by proponents of the standard model in astrophysics. The very best thing about the electric universe ideas are that they CONTAIN NO STUPID STRINGS OR UNOBSERVABLE PARTICLES, ENERGY, MATTER, OR EXTRA BUT INVISIBLE DIMENSIONS to mess up observing how things really work. Do the observations first; then the math for descriptive help. NOT the other way around. Read Peratt, Alfven, Arp, Thornhill, etc. Try to falsify it - that's what science does.

By J A Johnson (not verified) on 02 Mar 2009 #permalink