I’ve only shown globular clusters twice before and the last time was two years ago. It’s past time for a fresh look.
M5 is one of the largest and finest globulars in the sky. About 165 light years in diameter, it contains at least 100,000 stars and according to some estimates as many as 500,000.
Messier 5 (M 5) (29 min total exposure Jun 26, 2024)
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Globular clusters reside within the galactic halo, a sphere-shaped region of the Milky Way that extends above and below the center of the galactic disk. They are the oldest members of our galaxy – they formed first, as the galaxy was forming. In the tightly-packed central part of M5 the average distance between stars is as little as 1/40 of the distance between stars in our own neighborhood.
You’re looking at an object that’s around 13 billion years old, over twice the age of our solar system, and almost as old as the universe itself. Considering that M5 lies some 24,500 light-years distant, we can only imagine what this stellar city would look like if it was at the Pleiades’ distance of 430 light-years. Or imagine what an inhabitant of a planet of a star inside a globular cluster would see.