Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2013 January 6

= January 6 =

Freezing water
What other measures to lower freezing temperature of water beside increasing pressure and adding salt? I observe moving water also will not easily freeze, is it because of the movement? How do you explain this? Is the amplitude of the wave and speed of wave also a factor? Any other factors? Thank you. roscoe_x (talk) 01:57, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Lack of nucleation sites for ice crystals to form will also allow the water to get below freezing temp before it actually freezes. Once it starts, though, it will freeze even quicker than normal.  There are also any number of things you can add to lower the freezing temperature, such as alcohol or ethylene glycol (antifreeze). StuRat (talk) 02:25, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Generally, anything that dissolves in any substance (such as water) will lower that substance's freezing/melting point. StuRat has mentioned the ones that are commonly used to lower the melting point of water.  Depending on the concentration of the substance dissolved, cooling a liquid may take it thru a paste or slush stage (a eutectoid mixture) until lowering the temperature still further cause it to freeze solid.  This is essentially the same as dissolving tin in lead to make solder - the melting point is lower than that of both pure tin and pure lead.
 * With moving water, the key is not the overall velocity of the water or the speed of waves - the key is sheering and turbulence. By sheering I mean that one part of the water is moving faster than anothe part. If water is moving, the speed at which it is moving and the roughness of the surfaces surrounding it may induce turbulence, increasing local sheer.  Pressure inhibits it. Sheering breaks newly forming crystal bonds around the points of nucleation that StuRat mentioned.
 * Wickwack 124.178.53.163 (talk) 04:14, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

turning flourescent lights off and on
I read the article on flourescent lights but could not find the answer. Is turning a flourescent light off and on frequently (as when entering/exiting a room) less energy efficient than simply leaving it on for longer periods of time? Does it take more energy to "warm up" a flourescent light than just leaving it on? 99.250.103.117 (talk) 04:09, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * It is less energy efficient in theory as when you turn it on, the tube has to be started. During starting, the starter device sends heating current through the heaters in each end of the tube, and little or no light is emitted by the tube. In practice it would be difficult to measure the impact of any reasonable rate of switching on and off. The starting phase should be a second or less.  Be aware though that if you do switch flouros on and off frequently, the incresed thermochemical wear on the starter and on the heaters inside the tube will noticably shorten the life of them.  Wickwack 124.178.53.163 (talk) 04:21, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * The break-even point for leaving the fluorescent light on is 23 seconds. That is, the energy needed to "power up" a fluorescent light (the long straight tube kind) is equivalent to leaving it on for 23 seconds.  So, unless you plan to turn it off for less than 23 seconds, you should turn it off when you leave the room.  This isn't true for CFLs, where break-even time is something like 0.015 seconds, which I think is faster than you can flick the switch on and off.  -- Jayron  32  04:22, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Citation or explanation please. Many types of CFL, while they start immediate upon switching on, start at rather low brightness, and take several minutes to come up to full brioghtness.  Is the electricity consumption proportionaly reduced during the several minute "warm up" phase?  I rather suspect it's full current right from the start, but phosphor internal coating that converts the internally generated spectral light into white light has to warm up.  If that is so, there is no breaking even point.  Floda
 * I provided a citation for that number. You could click it.  -- Jayron  32  05:14, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Note that the current loop measurement method used by MythBusters is not valid, as it ignores power factor. A device powered from AC may draw a large current without using much energy if the current is not in phase with the voltage.
 * Floda 120.145.190.176 (talk) 04:37, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * That's fine. Do you have any alternative data?  -- Jayron  32  05:15, 6 January 2013(UTC)
 * I more or less asked you that. The data you linked is flawed because they used an invalid method, as I said.  There may well be a break even point with both normal and compact tubes (CFL), though I doubt it for CFL. I have no alternative measured data.  Floda 60.230.240.191 (talk) 08:32, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * The larger fluorescent fittings that still use a heater will draw current in phase with the voltage initially for the heating element, but the current after "striking" will be partly out of phase with the voltage so a current measurement over-estimates the power consumption (perhaps by 50%, depending on the phase angle?), so the break-even time will be longer than calculated. Adding this to the wear on starting, I would suggest that it is probably sensible to leave fluorescent lights on if the off period would be less than a few minutes, (perhaps three to five) but this is only an estimate, and others might have different opinions.  The exact time will vary with the cost of electricity and replacement parts.  I don't know of any thorough research which would include the shortening of tube, starter and choke lifetime.    D b f i r s   16:09, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * This is purely anecdotal, but I can confirm from my several years' working in the Facilities Maintenance sector that switching lights on and off is widely thought to shorten significantly the life of fluorescent tubes, and also cause some degree (perhaps insigificant, perhaps not) of deterioration in the associated switches and wiring.
 * In large office and manufacturing buildings and complexes, the cost of replacing a burnt-out tube (or starter, or other component of the light fitting or circuit) is surprisingly high – you have to factor in not only the chain of bureaucracy involved in getting a light changed (which might ultimately involve more than a dozen individuals, with attendant overheads) but often also the cost of cherrypickers and operators, or scaffolding erection and removal, to reach the light fittings, and the closure of areas for safety reasons.
 * Because of these factors, there is/was a school of thought that it's cheaper to leave the (relatively efficient) tubes on permanently, and office staff might not even have access to on/off switches. Certainly it's common practice to go itno a given building every year or two during planned "down-time" and change all the tubes for new, whether working or not. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 84.21.143.150 (talk) 17:36, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm confused.  Are you proposing that power a factor, where current and voltage are out of phase, is more efficient?  I don't think this is the case.  The difference between kVA and kW is lossy unless they are equal.  The generator absorbs this energy and it is wasted as heat.  --DHeyward (talk) 05:31, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
 * No, just cheaper for the end user, since the meter doesn't fully record the total energy used.   D b f i r s   09:09, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Power factor is defined as the ratio of dissipation to current x voltage, curent in amps, voltage in volts dissipation in watts. Where the ratio is less than unity, indicating the dissipation is less than amps x volts, it DOES NOT mean the difference is lost in the generator as heat. Note that power factor is made lower than unity if the current and voltage is not in phase, but that is not the only cause of PF less than unity.  It also results from harmonics in the current.  It is possible DHeyward has ben confused by texts stating that loads with low power factor (known as reactive loads) absorb and return energy during each cycle (20 millisec in a 50Hz system).  This energy just shuttles back and forth and is not inherently lost as heat anywhere. A system having diffrent kVA and kW is NOT lossy for that reason, however, the increased current does cause extra minor loss in wiring. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_factor
 * Electricity meters are constructed so that they only sense the in-phase part of the current and thus only register the true power used (kW) regardless of any increased current due to low power factor. Keit 124.182.27.187 (talk) 11:50, 8 January 2013 (UTC)


 * The above is correct (you get metered/charged for actual power, not apparent power), but Power factor does not say that wiring losses are minor. It implies that they are major: "if the load power factor were as low as 0.7 ... the losses in the circuit would be doubled" --Guy Macon (talk) 18:43, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
 * The losses can be made as small as you like by making the conductors/wiring heavy enough. Yes, a PF of 0.7071 (root 2) will double the wiring losses, but doubling (say) 1% is only 2%.  It is quite unlikely you would have losses amounting to as much as 1% in lighting circuits.  Keit 124.182.145.124 (talk) 01:38, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Take a look at this: http://www.ibiblio.org/london/renewable-energy/mailarchives/greenbuilding2/msg00356.html --Guy Macon (talk) 06:07, 8 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the link. Twenty minutes is longer than I expected, but is based on energy costs much lower than mine.    D b f i r s   09:09, 8 January 2013 (UTC)


 * The nice part is that you can plug your energy and bulb costs into the equation and get a definitive answer for your particular situation. When I did it I added my labor costs to the bulb costs by asking myself how much it is worth to me to not store an extra tube, not change an extra tube, and not discard an extra old tube. CFLs gave me a different number because they are easier to store, easier to change, and my local utility regularly subsidizes them at a dollar each. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:43, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Pseudosynesthesia
What would you call something like synesthesia that doesn't physically mess with the senses? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 04:59, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Since it is defined as a sensation in one sense that is triggered by another sense (eg perception that sounds are coloured), then, by definition the senses must be involved. Clarify what you are after - just what do you mean by "physically mess with the senses"?  Do you mean externally activating a sense?  Or physically altering brain circuitry?  Floda 60.230.240.191 (talk) 05:10, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * What do you mean by your question? Synesthesia is a condition related to perception, in that a person who receives a signal at one sense perceives that signal in other senses (i.e. when they see a color like "green", they also believe they smell a specific smell).  It should be noted that this is a "brain wiring" thing, perceiving a smell when you see the color green doesn't mean that there is any chemical stimulation of the receptors in your nose.  So I don't know what you mean by "physically mess with the senses".  There is no physical stimulation of the senses in synesthesia.  If there was physical stimulation of a sense causes the perception, that's just normal sensations.  -- Jayron  32  05:13, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Sure it happens in the brain, not the retina/cochlea/taste bud etc. but it doesn't seem that way to the sense-user.


 * Anyway, I think for most people, what color is the first note of Fur Elise or what pitch is 80 degrees Fahrenheit is a nonsense question - it is to me. What would you call a (sane) person who has an opinion without the actual sensation? Maybe there could be a third class of person who's even closer and just imagines the sensation? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 06:19, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * In other words, you want a word for someone who pretends that a musical note has a color, not who actually experiences that? I have a few words, but they're probably not appropriate for this forum.  -- Jayron  32  06:26, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I think Jayron is insinuating that some reports of synaesthesia are outright lies; this has almost certainly occurred, and confounds any actual effort to sincerely study the actual phenomenon. As our article elaborates, objectively verifying any report is non-trivial.  It is plausible that all reports of synaesthesia are "lies."  Perception is a very difficult thing to quantify and measure objectively; it is not necessarily clear what it even means to "lie" about perceiving something.  Nimur (talk) 19:14, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * No, I didn't insinuate that. I never used the word lie.  SMW stated that there's a class of person who merely imagines that they have a sensation.  I merely responded to his statement thereof.  I have no feelings whatsoever that any genuine synesthesia does or does not occur.  It is not my place to care one way or the other.  -- Jayron  32  19:26, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I don't think Jayron was insinuating that some reports are lies -- I think he was insinuating that the OP was insinuating that. And (OR here, believe me or not) it is certainly not plausible that all reports of synaesthesia are "lies." For as long as I can remember (presumably back to sometime in my childhood) I've seen specific colors when I've encountered specific numerical digits, letters, days of the week, or months of the year. Moreover, I'm aware that the color that goes with a particular digit, etc., is invariant over the span of decades. And that's how it can be verified -- ask someone detailed questions about the connections, and then ask them again years later. Researchers have done that, and they have found stability of the associations. Duoduoduo (talk) 19:32, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Associating certain numbers and colors (which I myself do) is different from actually sensing certain colors when one perceives certain numbers or letters. I don't do the latter--so I don't consider myself synaesthetic.  But my associations between such colors and symbols have been very stable over the years.  Given the nature of consciousness, I find it hard to deny that certain people do actually see the letter a as red, e as green, or s as yellow, in the way that I associate those things. μηδείς (talk) 22:25, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Medeis, I think that what you've described for yourself, if I understand it correctly, is exactly what synaesthesia refers to. It's not looking at this "5" and seeing it as something other than the black that actually appears on the screen -- rather, if someone says "think of the number "5", you see the "5" in your mind colored a certain way. Is that what you have? Duoduoduo (talk) 16:16, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

How long will blood stain and semen stain persist, respectively?
By "persist" I mean the existence of the stain's original substances can be identified--Inspector (talk) 10:09, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * It can be identified forever. However, if you go to the police now and show genuine regret, you will probably receive a lighter sentence.  I have taken the liberty of forwarding your IP and address information to your local precinct.  Please show some guilt and go to them yourself - and good luck.  178.48.114.143 (talk) 15:57, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I don't think they have "precincts" where he comes from. Also, I don't think you have his IP address. Finally, there are legal methods of producing blood and semen stains. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 16:17, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * According to Blood residue blood stains have been identified on 100,000-year-old stone tools. There are some references in the article that looks promising if you want to know more. However, I guess that the best answer is "it depends" on the surface, exposure and what attempts are made to wipe it off. Sjö (talk) 16:52, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Removed hat, if anything the question is silly, and the responses appropriate for such a question. μηδείς (talk) 22:17, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

why did people evolve to feel "hot"?
a question for you evolutionists here. Why did people evolve to feel "hot"? Was anything in the natural environment hot? (Before the man-made invention of fire). I mean, outside of things that are electric or fire, which had not been invented, I can't think of anything we would touch.

Or would you say that man's sense of "hot" evolved since Prometheus? (being metaphorical, obviously - I know someone actually invented fire, just don't know when.) thanks. 178.48.114.143 (talk) 15:15, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes there are, for example black sand at midday is painfully hot, as are other such dark rocks. Spending more than a few seconds in contact with it can cause skin damage.-- Gilderien Chat&#124;List of good deeds 15:18, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Man did not invent fire. We invented methods for starting fires. Fire already existed in nature. Dauto (talk) 15:42, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Wildfire. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:48, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

This really does not explain why organisms in the extreme latitudes would have developed a sense of "hot", since in the extreme North and South nothing is hot, ever. Yet Penguins do feel that. Why? Just in case of being transported to a Manhattan zoo? Clearly there is no evolutionary force here, and it is a lot more obvious that it was just designed this way. However, I am trying to keep an open mind and welcome your evolutionist answers as well for consideration - indeed, it is what I came here for. 178.48.114.143 (talk) 15:56, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * In fact, that is quite a neat demonstration of the fact that they descended from an ancestor who lived in a warmer climate, for much the reason that all cave fish have eyes - they are descended from a common anscestor to whom eyes would have been useful.-- Gilderien Chat&#124;List of good deeds 16:09, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Your assumption is simply false, fires do occur at the polar latitudes and they do have summers during which one can get sunburnt and when dark surfaces can heat enough in the sun to cause burns.


 * Also, note that the word "hot" is relative. What a penguin detects as hot would presumably be relative to the cold temperatures it is used to; in fact what the penguin feels is hot could be considered by a tropical creature to be cold. So, your question really boils down to "why can people/penguins detect changes in ambient (surrounding) temperatures". So, the supposition, from an evolutionary lens, is that it would be advantageous for creatures to feel something hot enough to burn it, since those that could not would presumably be killed or injured, reducing their ability to compete. Or if you're not limiting feeling "hot" to feeling burning, then presumably, creatures who could feel "hot" and "cold" would have an advantage over those who could not in terms of energy efficiency: warm-blooded creatures could maintain homeostasis better (less energy wasted shivering to create heat, less fluids wasted sweating to cool off), while cold-blooded animals would be able to find environments with suitable amounts of energy for them to function well, without extreme heat which would also be detrimental to their health.  Bramble  claw  x   18:04, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * There are obvious advantages to knowing ambient temperatures for both warm and cold blooded animals; it is necessary for homeostasis and would have an obvious differential survival rate for creatures that evolved over periods of time that included massive temperature fluctuations, among other hazards. The ability to detect temperature is much older than Homo sapiens, obviously — this is not a capability that we specially evolved, it is part of the general mammalian nervous system toolkit that evolved a long time earlier. As for feeling intense heat, like fires, that's not so much a detection of "heat" so much as it is a detection of pain. This page discusses the biology of this a bit. The neurons that fire in response to putting your hand on a very hot surface are not specialized to that perception. --Mr.98 (talk) 19:01, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I would add that asking "Why did anything evolve anything?" kind of misses the point of how evolution works. Evolution doesn't have a specific purpose or "goal". Further, not every observable trait even has an evolutionary "purpose", a lot of traits are simply by-products of the evolutionary process, they could be 'correlated or associated with another trait that evolution did select for, or it could even be an inevitable or unavoidable consequence of some physical or biological factor. Why did we evolve to die when we loose a lot of blood? Well, we didn't, we have blood and we can't survive without it, we didn't "evolve" this trait, it's an unavoidable consequence based on our biology. The second mistake is to say why did PEOPLE evolve to feel hot? Clearly people DIDN'T evolve to feel hot, that is a trait passed down from at least our fish ancestors if not much earluer. There is obviously a very close relationship between neurons and nerves and heat receptors, it seems at some fundamental level they are related and I would even hazard a guess that maybe it's not even possible to have a brain made of neurons that can't feel heat. Vespine (talk) 05:50, 7 January 2013 (UTC)


 * An obvious follow-up question would be "Are there any animals which can sense changes in temperature, but lack a 'this is too hot. dangerous. Flee!'-response, on account of such situations being nearly non-existent in their natural environment ?" 157.193.175.207 (talk) 08:13, 7 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Boiling frogs is a possible fit. Astronaut (talk) 19:28, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Except that the lede of that article says "According to contemporary biologists the premise of the story is not literally true". Duoduoduo (talk) 20:09, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
 * on the other hand, before getting down this far, regarding the discussion re humans or their ancestors experiencing fire, the first thing that leapt to mind was "not in our water dwelling ancestors". maybe that reasoning is the source of the boiling frog meme? Gzuckier (talk) 23:04, 9 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I still think this line of questioning is barking up the wrong tree. There is no such thing as a bilogical system without at least some heat, even at the extreme latitudes. Well hot is the same type of thing as warm, the difference is scale, not type. So if you can feel warmth, you can feel heat, I don't see the mystery. Did we evolve to feel a "vacuum", I'm sure we didn't, but I bet you would feel it if you were exposed to it. Vespine (talk) 02:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC)


 * People seasonally adapt to temperature just as they adapt altitude. Climbers for Mount Everest double their RbC at base cap and is why they "acclimate" for three weeks.  As for heat, you will notice that people tend to put jackets on earlier in the fall and take them off earlier in the spring.  This is because the body continually adapts to external temperature and grow capillaries near the surface in summer and they die off in the winter.  60F in March is a lot warmer that 60F in September.   Feeling hot is that the body is not shedding heat fast enough and the actions to cool down protects organs from damage.  --DHeyward (talk) 05:41, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Moon and milk

 * 1) Which country's astronauts landed on moon first - USA or USSR ? What were their names ?
 * 2) Is it true that cream (upper layer) of milk contain more nutrients than the milk ? When water is heated it slowly starts changing into vapor, but when milk is heated it overflows the container (unlike water). Why ? 106.212.34.233 (talk) 18:50, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * The USSR never landed on the moon. The first two men on the moon were, in order, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.  Read more at Apollo program.
 * Depends on which nutrients. Here is heavy cream and here is whole milk.  It appears that some nutrients are more abundant in cream, and others in milk, per serving size.  For 2b, the reason that milk boils over is that the stuff in the milk provides many nucleation sites for bubbles to form, so when it boils, you get millions of really tiny bubbles.  These bubbles take up a lot of space, which causes the milk to "boil over" such that pure water (which has no real nucleation sites, so forms larger, and less numerous, bubbles) does not.  -- Jayron  32  18:57, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * 2) I think boiling over has more to do with the bubbles failing to pop, which is related to the relative surface tension of water and milk, presumably. StuRat (talk) 21:33, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * See also Moonmilk. --   Jack of Oz   [Talk]  21:48, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * And there's never a bad time to reread La distanza della luna from Italo Calvino's inspired Cosmicomiche, where they mine the actual milk of the Moon. --Trovatore (talk) 22:39, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Soviet robots made it to the moon; see Lunokhod programme. Alansplodge (talk) 22:35, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes. Robots don't count as astronauts or cosmonauts. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:32, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Unless the robots are cosmonaut-powered and -operated... 24.23.196.85 (talk) 02:54, 7 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Actaully, I bet boiling milk is more complicated then surface tension. I don't believe the surface tension of milk is very different to that of water, milk is very watery and extremely easily miscible with water, I don't think that would be the case if their surface tensions were dissimilar. What is dissimilar however is that milk contains proteins, I have no reference, but i suspect proteins would be responsible for ease with which milk boils over. Vespine (talk) 05:39, 7 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Specifically it's the protein casein that forms an emulsion with water in milk, which denatures at a temperature below the boiling point of water, forming a film around the bubbles of water vapour, this is what forms a milk skin. Mikenorton (talk) 07:03, 7 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Agreed, and this holds the bubbles together long enough for the pot to boil over. Also note that this can happen with other foods, like pasta, presumably due to a similar mechanism causing the formation of foam. StuRat (talk) 21:07, 7 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I've personally observed this with rice -- the starch dissolves in the hot water and greatly increases the viscosity and surface tension (in fact, the sharp increase in viscosity near the end is the sign that the rice is just about ready). 24.23.196.85 (talk) 05:02, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Questions About Pregnancy
I've got a couple of questions about pregnancy. Please do not interpret my questions as offensive or misogynistic, since that is not my intention at all. I'm simply trying to learn more info about this topic.


 * Does pregnancy affect a woman's emotions and to what extent? Also, does the part of the brain/mind that causes us to think rationally work the same way when a woman is pregnant in comparison as to when she is not pregnant?
 * How does pregnancy feel? (Serious question.)

Thank you very much. Futurist110 (talk) 19:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, there are emotional changes that are common with pregnancy. According to the Mayo Clinic, it's normal for pregnant women to feel delighted, anxious, exhilarated, exhausted and stressed, and have bouts of weepiness and/or mood swings, which can sometimes be severe or intense.  You could also just ask a woman who is or has been pregnant (which is most women) how it feels.  Red Act (talk) 20:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * How does pregnancy feel? Believe me it feels different. It was the first sign I experienced - I simply felt different. Just don't ask me to say exactly how I felt different though - I was never pregnant for long enough to quantify it. --TammyMoet (talk) 21:12, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Tangential velocity of galaxies
I remember reading some time ago that while it is easy to measure the radial velocity of a galaxy wrt the Milky Way, a galaxy's relative tangential velocity cannot be measured at all. 1) Is this true? 2) If so, what's the reason? and 3) Would such measurements be of any use? 65.92.7.202 (talk) 22:30, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * The relative radial velocity can be determined from the galaxy's red shift. See the proper motion article for the tangential component. --catslash (talk) 22:39, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * The are extremely useful but very hard to measure. Tangential velocities are only known for several galaxies in the Local group including Andromeda Galaxy. However the precision is generally low. Ruslik_ Zero 18:21, 7 January 2013 (UTC)


 * The links in Catslash's answer doubtless address 1) and 2) adequately but perhaps not 3). Re this: knowing the real space velocities of galaxies would be of some interest in that it would help to confirm whether or not a given galaxy was gravitationally bound to its nearest neighbours (as in, for example, the Local Group). This in turn might shed light on the past history of those close neighbors' formation – presumably from a discrete primordial cloud – or reveal whether an apparent member of that galaxy cluster was in fact from elsewhere and in close proximity merely by chance. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 84.21.143.150 (talk) 18:19, 7 January 2013 (UTC)