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Ok. Care to tell us the name of this object? It appears to be M3 in Canes Venatici.

Sorry about that. Is the Globular cluster Messier 3.

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Are the stars we see there closer to each other than the sun is from other stars?

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I would also like to hear that answer.

I was asking myself that exact same question. There could by intergalactic civilizations out there while we're just some Rogue outcast system no one knows about.

I think this Youtube video discusses globular clusters along the way and he basically said that the stars there are much closer together than our own sun + Proxima Centauri as well there would be a lot more of them. I think said that at night there would be so much starlight that it might cast shadows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naz67yhu_g8

Significantly closer! The stellar density in the Solar neighborhood is around 0.14 pc^(-3), in globular cluster cores that goes up to ~ 1000 pc^(-3). That may also mean that the formation (and survival) of any planets is significantly suppressed around the stars in a globular cluster.

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An incredible half-million stars? The galaxy has what, 100 billion? I guess numbers are hard.

Are you ok fella?

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Why would an increase in stellar density suppress planet formation? Curious.

Good question! On the planet formation side: protoplanetary disks would be heavily irradiated by the other nearby stars, which tends to shorten the lifetime available to planet formation; they can also get disrupted by flyby-events. If a planetary system does form, those same flybys continue and can disrupt it over longer timescales. On the other hand, we don't - to the best of my knowledge - have very good constraints on planet occurrence rates in globular clusters, because they're far away and hard to observe, but I would say from a theoretical point of view these are quite well-understood mechanisms.

Thanks! I guess I wouldn't have expected much interaction between the systems.

It's still rare, but the orders of magnitude higher density, and the fact that globular clusters get quite old, means that there's a lot of opportunities. Here's a recent paper about the topic, if you want to read more.

You have an incredible one ton of sand in your house? There are millions of tons of sand on beaches. I guess numbers are hard.

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This beautiful picture causes me a lot of existential crisis and also helps relieve some of my stress. What is our life purpose amidst this ocean of wondrous creation.

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Half a million stars is incredibly large for a globular cluster. I guess context is hard.

Is it? I don't know the number of stars in the average globular cluster. I guess the rest of you do. *hanging my head*

The next half of the title literally says it's one of the largest and brightest globular clusters.

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Space has a way of intriguing and terrifying me at the same time.

Dude it's like if I would imagine you could see the heavens from earth, this is what I would expect it to be like.

I was just thinking that. It gives me a strange feeling looking at this and I love it. It made me think that God created all of this and heaven would be a place somewhere in that cluster hopefully lol. I wish there wasn't so much light pollution around where I live because I want to get a nice telescope to look at this stuff. I might get one anyways I would just have to travel out to nowhere and camp for the night.

Does someone count that shit or do they just set up a computer to count every dot

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