AaS! 168: Can We Get Some Love for Globular Clusters?

Ask a Spaceman!

Paul M. Sutter

Astrophysics, Science, Cosmos, Holes, Black, Astronomy, Natural Sciences, Universe, Cosmology, Space, Physics

4.8 • 853 Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2022

⏱️ 30 minutes

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Summary

How are globular clusters so old? Where did they come from, and how are they linked to galaxy formation? What makes them so globular, anyway? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.

Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).

Transcript

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0:00.0	What the heck are these things?
0:10.4	They're weird.
0:11.8	That's what they are.
0:12.9	Most of them are relatively small.
0:16.0	Only a couple dozen parsecs across.
0:18.5	And if you're not too hot on your parsecs, think, say, 50 light years
0:23.7	across and smaller. But what they lack in size, they more than make up for in mass. They are
0:31.7	truly massive. They typically contain hundreds of thousands of stars, sometimes millions of them.
0:40.8	That means they are incredibly dense. On average, the distance between stars in these things
0:47.7	is around one light year. Compare that to our nearest neighbor star and Dramida Proxima
0:54.0	Centauri about four light years away.
0:57.0	But in their cores, the average distance shrinks to a mere one-third of a light year.
1:03.1	That means stars are packed inside of them a thousand times more densely than our own stellar
1:09.9	neighborhood.
1:10.7	Imagine what the view must be like from inside of there,
1:14.6	like the inside of a glittering jewel box.
1:19.0	And they're old.
1:20.5	They have no new star formation.
1:23.7	They're all somewhere around 8 to 12 billion years old, with little, if any, new stars forming in them.
1:36.3	These are some of the, if not the, oldest intact structures in the universe that have not undergone distortions or evolution.
1:48.8	They are simply there and have been for billions of years.
1:53.2	These things are older than galaxies.
	...

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