What If We Lived in a Globular Cluster?

Take some cosmic dust and gas, add billions and billions of planets and a whole lot of stars to the mix. Spice it all up with a handful of gravity to hold things together, and you get a galaxy. Shaken, not stirred. Some of those ingredients would get clumped together. The gases and dust would merge into stars. And stars would get packed together into globular clusters. Some of these clusters could count up to a million stars stuffed into an area 3.2 light-years across. To put that in perspective, the closest star to our Sun is about 4.37 light-years away.

Could a planet even exist where so many stars are so close together?

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Which country would be first? And why would moondust be your biggest problem?

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Produced by Underknown in Toronto, What If is a mini-documentary web series that takes you on an epic journey through hypothetical worlds and possibilities. Join us on an imaginary adventure — grounded in scientific theory — through time, space and chance, as we ask what if some of the most fundamental aspects of our existence were different.

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