4.8 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 18 January 2022
⏱️ 30 minutes
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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).
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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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