NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided astronomers with the best observational evidence to date that globular clusters sort out stars according to their mass, governed by a gravitational billiard ball game between stars. Heavier stars slow down and sink to the cluster's core, while lighter stars pick up speed and move across the cluster to its periphery. This process, called "mass segregation," has long been suspected for globular star clusters, but has never before been directly seen in action.
A typical globular cluster contains several hundred thousand stars. Although the density of stars is very small in the outskirts of such stellar systems, the stellar density near the centre can be more than 10,000 times higher than in the local vicinity of our Sun. If we lived in such a region of space, the night sky would be ablaze with 10,000 stars that would be closer to us than the nearest star to the Sun, Alpha Centauri, which is 4.3 light-years away (or approximately 215,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun).

IMAGE (130KB, 800 X 640)
Position (2000): R.A. 00h 24m 05s.67 Dec. -72° 04' 52".6

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`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

Is there any simulation of such a sky in the web ?

all i found is this painting http://www.prashantsolomon.com/art/galaxyps1a.jpg

rather like paintings of this guy by the way.

IMHO, artist renderings and simulations are VERY misleading.

http://www.noao.edu/image_gallery/html/im0063.html

For example, compare this painting of a galaxy with M51. Notice that the arms are pretty similar in size and structure but the dust (gases) inbetween are very different, so it can give very different attributes on scales that are not realistic. Any artist rendering cannot possibly get all the subtle differences that must be taken into consideration when analizing any of these phenomena, IMHO.

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RussT
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Everything is, as it should be, otherwise, it wouldn't be!

Hi , thank you for your answer.

But may it time to go to bed but I did not found the painting.

What i was interested into was only the spectacular show of a sky seen from a planet inside a globular cluster. Not that analysing this phenomena has not its merits of course.

For example, compare this painting of a galaxy with M51. Notice that the arms are pretty similar in size and structure but the dust (gases) inbetween are very different, so it can give very different attributes on scales that are not realistic. Any artist rendering cannot possibly get all the subtle differences that must be taken into consideration when analizing any of these phenomena, IMHO.

Hi , thank you for your answer.

But may it time to go to bed but I did not found the painting.

What i was interested into was only the spectacular show of a sky seen from a planet inside a globular cluster. Not that analysing this phenomena has not its merits of course]

Yes, they are fine to look at, and get some kind of idea on what is being presented. I was just suggesting caution, when trying to put too much significance on any particular aspect of it.

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RussT
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Everything is, as it should be, otherwise, it wouldn't be!

Here is a nice artists impression ,
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/press/globular-sm.jpg but I think the colour & size of stars is well off!

Edit:Much better here;
http://terpsichore.stsci.edu/~summer...r/spz/spz.html

Thanks Ciderman.

They're pretty obscure on how exactly mass segregation was "seen directly."

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PW -- Plant Whisperer

There are some pretty good details in the full press release:

http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/html/heic0616.html

You can find the full story in the technical article:

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/np...4c573e6c329949