4/30/2023 0 Comments Star stable seal forgotten fields![]() A message leaving Earth at the speed of light would take around four years to reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the sun in a globular cluster, it could take just over a month. That longevity, coupled with the very small distances between the stars, means it might be possible for civilizations to travel and develop outposts, Di Stefano says.Īnd if technologically advanced lifeforms evolved, they’d have an easy time talking to one another. ![]() Growing up among an old, stable population of stars, planets could survive for billions of years-plenty of time for life to emerge and develop advanced technologies. “In a way, it would be very serene to live in a globular cluster,” Di Stefano says. Though their skies might be crowded, most of the stars are small and tranquil, destined to die a gentle death they don’t have any big, blustery neighbors threatening to go supernova anytime soon. If there are planets in globular clusters, they could find themselves in safe, pleasant neighborhoods. “The two things that are bad for are faint stars and really crowded stars,” says Steve Howell, who works on NASA’s planet-finding Kepler mission. So, perhaps the real reason we haven’t yet discovered similar planets in clusters is simply that they’re difficult to spot. ![]() However, small rocky exoplanets have been found orbiting stars containing only a fraction of the metal found in our sun. One proposed explanation for this planet shortage is that gravitational interactions between the densely packed stars may have kicked planets out of their systems, leaving them to wander through interstellar space.Īnother possibility is that stars in clusters tend to be very metal-poor, a characteristic associated with a lack of large planets. And it’s not even orbiting a proper star, but a pulsar. Each contains thousands to millions of stars, but, so far only one exoplanet has been found in a globular cluster. The Milky Way’s roughly 150 globular clusters are about 10 billion years old-nearly as old as the galaxy. “Globular clusters may indeed contain very old, advanced civilizations,” said Rosanne Di Stefano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics on Wednesday at a conference of the American Astronomical Society. Astronomers searching for noisy extraterrestrials might try looking in a most unexpected place: dense conglomerates of stars that appear to be largely empty of planets.
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