Abstract
When a star cluster forms, all of its constituent stars are moving relative to one another. The interstellar froth from which they formed was in constant motion and this continued as individual cloud cores (Chap. 2) continued to collapse into protostars then stars. For clusters with masses in the range of 100,000 to 1 million stars, the speeds are on the order of 5–15 km/s, or a few tens of thousands of miles per hour. Within this melée of moving objects, there will be a high fraction of binary stars that are moving around their common center of gravity at several hundred kilometers per second.
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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Stevenson, D. (2015). The Complex Lives of Globular Clusters. In: The Complex Lives of Star Clusters. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14234-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14234-0_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-14233-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-14234-0
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