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To: Jonty30

Fun to look at from a distance, but probably not very healthy close up. With an average distance of about .83 ly between stars an awful lot of radiation would saturate the cluster - Not to mention the occasional supernova (I calculate about one every 750,000 years in the cluster) which would sterilize everything. Since evolution occurs on a lot slower time scale than the rate of supernovas, this alone would probably be enough to preclude the development of life.


8 posted on 06/15/2011 5:58:09 AM PDT by from occupied ga (your own government is your most dangerous enemy)
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To: from occupied ga

Possibly on the moon of a gas giant with enough magnetosphere oompf to provide a safe envelope against supernovae waves? Or a binary with plenty of iron-radioactives in the liquid core to maintain a strong magnetosphere and push aside bad things. Who knows? The Universe is likely a very interesting place.

I wonder at the configuration of this GC and whether it has a strong x-ray source/black hole at its core as the larger actual galaxies do. Perhaps there is a mass threshold for black hole formation in large stellar groups and this cluster hasn’t reached it...


14 posted on 06/15/2011 12:01:03 PM PDT by BrewingFrog (I brew, therefore I am!)
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