Bruce McClure
Bruce McClure has served as lead writer for EarthSky s popular Tonight pages since 2004. He s a sundial aficionado, whose love for the heavens has taken him to Lake Titicaca in Bolivia and sailing in the North Atlantic, where he earned his celestial navigation certificate through the School of Ocean Sailing and Navigation. He also writes and hosts public astronomy programs and planetarium programs in and around his home in upstate New York.
Clusters Nebulae Galaxies earthsky.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from earthsky.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Astronomy Essentials | EarthSky earthsky.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from earthsky.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Omega Centauri in infrared light via Spitzer Space Telescope/ Wikimedia Commons.
Omega Centauri, the largest globular star cluster of the Milky Way, contains about 10 million stars. This behemoth, with a diameter of 230 light-years, is 10 times more massive than a typical globular cluster. Despite all these stars, scientists released a study in 2018 that said Omega Centauri probably is not home to life.
Stars pack so tightly inside Omega Centauri that the average distance between stars in the cluster’s core is 0.16 light-years, much closer than the sun’s nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, at 4.25 light-years. Scientists concluded that stars in Omega Centauri would gravitationally interact with each other too frequently to harbor stable habitable planets.