supervirial
supervirial adjective: expanding at an accelerating rate.
Adjective
supervirial (not comparable)
- Expanding at an accelerating rate.
- For example, the 0.5-2 Myr old Orion Nebula Cluster ( ONC ), which is known to be supervirial with a virial mass about twice the observed mass ( Hillenbrand & Hartmann 1998 ), has already expelled its residual gas and is expanding rapidly.2008, Johan Hendrik Knapen, T. J. Mahoney, Alexandre Vazdekis, Pathways Through an Eclectic Universe, page 6
- For many of the young (~10Myr) star clusters M_(dyn) >> Mₚₕₒₜ Goodwin & Bastian (2006) suggest that this is a signature of gas expulsion and the 'infant mortality' scenario discussed in Section 2.1, i.e., they conclude that these clusters are supervirial.2010, Mark Gieles, “Star Cluster Disruption”, in Richard de Grijs, Jacques R. D. Lépine, editors, Star Clusters (IAU S266): Basic Galactic Building Blocks, page 75
Origin of supervirial
From super- + virial.
Questions about supervirial
- What does supervirial mean?
- Supervirial means expanding at an accelerating rate.
- What part of speech is supervirial?
- Supervirial is an adjective.
Words near supervirial in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: supervirial (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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