Comments on: Dating a globular may give you a case of X-ray binaries

By: IsAB

IsAB — Fri, 02 May 2008 21:33:36 +0000

“I was hoping I could get you to speculate a bit on whether you think there could be solar systems in such a dense packed stellar neighborhood and if so, what do you think it would be like to live on an Earth-like planet deep in a Globular Cluster?…”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov)

By: Tom Marking

Tom Marking — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 02:49:46 +0000

“what do you think it would be like to live on an Earth-like planet deep in a Globular Cluster?”

Most globular clusters tend to have older stars with very low metallicity. Therefore we wouldn’t expect there to be enough of the elements heavier than helium to produce a lot of terrestrial planets similar to earth. So as far as I know globular clusters are considered a bad bet for life and that’s why very few SETI searches include them as part of their targeted searches.

By: Ronn Blankenship

Ronn Blankenship — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 02:44:24 +0000

DenverAstroon wrote:

I was hoping I could get you to speculate a bit on whether you think there could be solar systems in such a dense packed stellar neighborhood and if so, what do you think it would be like to live on an Earth-like planet deep in a Globular Cluster? I have thought about this and can just imagine how beautiful a night sky would look under those conditions.

Particularly if night falls somewhat more frequently than once every 2,049 years . . .

By: Tom Marking

Tom Marking — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:12:02 +0000

Here is a good article talking about the tension between ages of the universe built on the Hubble constant versus ages estimated for globular clusters. It turns out that the age estimates of 16-20 billion years for globular clusters during the 1980’s have gradually been reduced so that they now fit with the age estimates for the universe as a whole.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chaboyer/science.pdf

By: Salt in Water » In other news,

Salt in Water » In other news, — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:00:42 +0000

[...] seems dating globular clusters isn’t as easy and straightforward as once thought. First, there is the problem of getting all [...]

By: Robin Baumgarten

Robin Baumgarten — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:36:07 +0000

“So obviously, you have to be careful when dating heavenly bodies. They might look older on the outside, but be younger and less mature on the inside.”

I heard the underage laws are quite strict in the US…

By: Richard B. Drumm

Richard B. Drumm — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 03:37:03 +0000

I agree with Denver, Phil, great post!
I wonder what you’d be able to see if you did a 3D plot of globs’ black hole masses versus number of binaries vs spectroscopic ages. There must be some cutoff where the black holes’ masses enable the binary systems to form more often…
Hmmmm….. Might be a paper in there…
Missed you at the NRAO Open House… ;-D
Rich in Charlottesville