- IN April 1945, in the fastness of the Führerbunker in the Reich chancellery in Berlin, Goebbels read aloud to Hitler from the latter’s favorite book, Carlyle’s Frederick the Great. What he read were those pages dealing with the desperate and, apparently, hopeless posture of the Prussian king toward the end of the even Years’ War, just before the sudden and unexpected death of the Czarina Elizabeth which resulted in the elimination of Russia from the alliance against Frederick, and thus his seemingly miraculous salvation. Goebbels reported that “tears stood in the Führer’s eyes” during this reading. When Franklin D. Roosevelt died, a few days later, Hitler thought that another, similar miracle was about to occur. But the analogy proved to be inexact. By the end of April both Hitler and Goebbels were dead, and the thousand-year Reich had collapsed.
- Open cluster (Wikipedia)
An open cluster is a type of star cluster made of tens to a few thousand stars that were formed from the same giant molecular cloud and have roughly the same age. More than 1,100 open clusters have been discovered within the Milky Way galaxy, and many more are thought to exist. Each one is loosely bound by mutual gravitational attraction and becomes disrupted by close encounters with other clusters and clouds of gas as they orbit the Galactic Center. This can result in a loss of cluster members through internal close encounters and a dispersion into the main body of the galaxy. Open clusters generally survive for a few hundred million years, with the most massive ones surviving for a few billion years. In contrast, the more massive globular clusters of stars exert a stronger gravitational attraction on their members, and can survive for longer. Open clusters have been found only in spiral and irregular galaxies, in which active star formation is occurring.