Old, crowded star clusters might be the best place for an advanced civilization to survive in a harsh galaxy, a new study suggests.
Stable, long-lived stars in these clusters and the relative ease of hopping from one star system to the next could provide a safe space for any technologically savvy species that can leave its home and establish outposts around other stars. “The probability of a catastrophic event destroying such a civilization then becomes small,” said astronomer Rosanne Di Stefano. She presented the study January 7 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Globular star clusters pack hundreds of thousands of stars into balls just a few hundred light-years across. They’re also ancient; at over 10 billion years old, many have been around for as long as the galaxy. All of the cluster’s massive stars exploded long ago, leaving behind a population of low-mass, low-key stars. “It would be very serene to live in a globular cluster,” said Di Stefano, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
The stars are also jammed in next to each other. Whereas Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun, is 4.2 light-years away, the distance between stars in the core of a globular cluster can be roughly 0.01 light-years — comparable to the width of the solar system. That would make the night sky very bright, but it also makes interstellar travel easier.
...
