What it is - to live in a star cluster?

Thirty thousand suns shone bright with stunning soul splendor, more cold and terrifying in its eerie indifference than the cruel wind, permeates cold, ugly gloomy world. I>





Our planet is on the periphery of the Milky Way, in a place that is not yet a stellar vacuum, so to speak, but the concentration of the light here is very low. As a result, to the nearest star from us - a few light-years, and in the night sky, you can count no more than 6000 stars (in any of the hemispheres).

But there are places where stars are much, much more. This - star clusters, or clusters. What if our Sun is in such a cluster? Then our sky would look very unusual (for us today, of course). A team of astronomers working with Astronomy Magazine, decided to show what can be like - to live on the planet, whose system is inside the star cluster.

chosen as an example cluster 47 Tucanae (NGC 104) . From us this cluster is 17 thousand light years, and its diameter is only 120 light years (at the time, as the diameter of the galaxy is thousands of light years).



47 Toucan i>

In cluster 47 Tucana - 570,000 stars, and they are all relatively close to each other. Probably, some of these stars have planets, and that the model of the form to the sky with one of these planets. In this cluster, our planet would be surrounded by several hundreds of stars per square light-year (thousands of stars per square parsec). This is several thousand times higher stellar density than in our location. Average distance from star to star in this case is to 0, 05 light-years.



According to experts, such a planet, you can see more than 130 thousand light illuminating the planet is 20 times brighter than our Earth illuminates the moon at night.

Incidentally, as a teenager, I read a story Asimov & quot; And darkness came & quot ;. In this work, a very interesting life played out civilization on a planet similar cluster. Epigraph, incidentally, is taken from this work.

Via io9

Source: habrahabr.ru/post/226127/

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