moon phases

The globular M80 is about 36,000 light years away and and is receding from us at a measly 11 miles per second. This massive cluster of stars is 50 light years in diameter. So exactly how tightly packed is this stellar snowball? What would night be like on a planet orbiting a star at the M80 core? Here are some hypotheticals.

Based on figures established for a similar globular - M13 - the stars in the core are separated by about a half a light year. As a comparison, the distance from the Sun to Pluto is about 5 light hours (LH), making the diameter of Pluto's orbit (thus the diameter of our solar system) 10 LHs. There are 547.5 days in a years and a half, multiplied by 24 hours equals 13,140 hours in a year and a half. Dividing that by the number of LH of Pluto's orbit - 10 - we can calculate you could put 1,314 solar systems like ours between any 2 stars at the core!!

Another possible model would be that it you took 1 million grains of sand (0.03 inches in diam.) to represent stars, each one would be a mile and a half apart. Still, the stars in M80 appear as a single glowing mass.

If you lived on a planet with in the core of M80, the nights would be ablaze with stars 1/8th the distance as our closest stellar neighbor. The dimmest would be similar in magnitude to Sirius (the brightest star in the sky) contrasting others the brightness of a full moon. A person living on that planet would probably never know of anything beyond that globular cluster, or what it means for night to be dark.