Robert, thanks for the Bruno Leibundgut referral
Hi everybody, I just got back from my dark-moon sojourn at Weltevreden Farm here in S Africa. The nearest Internet access is 80 kms away and that place closes at 5:00 in the afternoon and noon on Saturdays. It's nice to hear from somebody besides 300 sheep and a couple of dogs. Robert, I downloaded the Leibendgut paper; thanks much for this & your other referrals. May I recommend to everybody NGC 3603 in Carina? It is practically its own “Guinness Book of Astral Records”—largest HII region associated with a massive cluster, over 2000 solar masses of O and B stars alone, 100 times the ionizing power of the Trapezium, yet a high proportion of sub-solar mass stars that have managed to form in a cloud collapse whose progenitor was 8 times the mass of S Doradus. Yet to look at it visually, it’s about as unexotic as you can find—a pinch of glitter inside a circle less than 60 arcsec dia. I can pick out only about 10 points inside that circle—all 100+ solar-mass O stars, to judge from the scads of info in an literature search. I came across it by accident while reading papers devoted to the cometary appearance of the nearby N3576 nebular complex. Frankly, I thought, “3603? So what?” till I read the arXiv and IOP papers. It has the most exotic C-M plot I've ever seen (attached). Don't you just l-o-v-e it when something you never saw before turns out to be such a Really Big Deal?
=Dana in SA
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