What Does cumulus Mean
The Latin word cumŭlus arrived in Castilian as a cumulus . The concept can be used to name the accumulation or disorderly stacking of various elements .
For example: "When the meeting ended, I experienced a host of sensations" , "My life is a host of problems, I need a vacation" , "The host of government errors caused this social crisis . "
In this framework, if someone refers to the “accumulation of difficulties” that they had to go through to reach a goal, they will be referring to all the problems that they had to overcome to meet their objective .
In the field of astronomy , on the other hand, the group of small stars that is thick to the eye is called a cluster . Star clusters are generated by the attraction produced by the mutual gravity of the stars.
According to the traditional classification, it is possible to distinguish open star clusters from globular ones. The open clusters are composed of young stars (whose age can be among the hundred and one billion years), while globular clusters are composed of old stars, whose age may exceed a billion years.
Open clusters, on the other hand, have fewer stars than globular clusters. They also disintegrate over time due to their interaction with molecular clouds as they move through the galaxy, while globular clouds have higher degrees of stability and density, which makes them less prone to disintegration, although this does not prevent them from sooner or later they are destroyed.
Beyond the differences in the number of stars (which inevitably affects the mass of both types of clusters) and the age of each one, it is also possible to distinguish them by the wealth of metals they present (the open ones surpass the globular ones in this aspect) and by its orbit (globular ones belong to the halo population, and the open ones belong to the disk one).
Despite all that has been said, the dimensions of their nuclei are not very different: both in open and globular clusters, it can be measured in a few parsecs (the unit called parsec or parsec is used in the field of astronomy and its definition is the distance at which an astronomical unit joins with an arc angle one second).
In the 1980s and 1990s, some researchers discovered that this classification was not sufficient to include all types of star clusters that exist. In the Magellanic Clouds , to cite an example, there are clusters of dimensions comparable to those of globular ones, although of an age that does not allow them to be located in this group. Stellar clusters with similar characteristics have also been discovered outside our galaxy , with masses much higher than globular ones, and they are called superclusters .
In the Milky Way there are also superclusters, and some of them lie behind huge clouds of dust. It is important to distinguish star clusters from star associations , clusters that are not bound by gravity and that are slowly dispersed.
In the field of meteorology , cumulus clouds are groupings of clouds characteristic of the summer season, which resemble mountains with snow . Also called cumulus , these clouds have a prominent vertical development and their edges are bright and well defined.
For geology , cluster is the gathering of crystals in magma . The notion is also used to name the rock that results from this accumulation process.
The cytology finally appeals to the idea of cluster of differentiation to refer to antigens found on the surface of leukocytes, used to identify the type of cell and its activity.