Start Searching the Answers
The Internet has many places to ask questions about anything imaginable and find past answers on almost everything.
The Question & Answer (Q&A) Knowledge Managenet
The Internet has many places to ask questions about anything imaginable and find past answers on almost everything.
Inside a globular cluster, there might not be enough building materials for a rocky planet like Earth to be formed. Even our Sun might have had trouble forming in those conditions. Binary star systems aren’t unusual in the Universe, but they are less likely to host habitable planets that we could live on.
Globular clusters are old clusters of stars that have remained in a gravitationally bound system. Open clusters are much younger and smaller than globular clusters. They are the recent birthplaces of new stars, which form out of clouds of dust and gas, and contain only hundreds or thousands of stars.
150 globular clusters
Virgo Cluster
The Nearest Superclusters
Getting ages for many star clusters has led to some interesting results.
Deep Galileo (Telescopio Nazionale Galileo) B, V and I images of Segue 3, reaching V ∼ 25, reveal that it is the youngest globular cluster known so far in the Galaxy. A young age of 3.2 Gyr is found, differently from a previous estimate of 12 Gyr.
By placing the stars in a globular cluster on a Hertzprung-Russell diagram, astronomers can determine the cluster’s age by looking at the main sequence turnoff point and comparing it with models of stellar evolution.
Ejnar Hertzsprung
In the image above, you can see a schematic HR diagram with plots of lines that represent the Main Sequence for a number of open clusters. From the location of the Main Sequence Turn-Off, you can see that NGC 2362 is the youngest, then h & χ Persei, and M67 is the oldest of the clusters.
The spectral sequence is also a colour sequence: the O- and B-type stars are intrinsically the bluest and hottest; the M-, R-, N-, and S-type stars are the reddest and coolest.