Re: Intelligent signals from globular clusters?

I like the way you tell the story: "Once upon a time..."; makes a nice
break from all the hard science talk! :-)

So, if these mainly population II orange/reddish stars that make up
most globulars are the *original* stars that were created at the time
of the cluster's birth, then they would be extremely old. I think the
age of a globular cluster is typically of the order of 1.2 x 10^10 (12
billion) odd years or so.

So if these stars are the original ones, and they never went bang as
either supernovae or red giants since the cluster's formation, how can
they keep themselves burning for that astonishing length of time? Would
they not have exhausted their original H/He fuel supplies? The other
thing that perplexes me is the similarity between individual stars:
they all look so much alike in hi-res images of large clusters like
Omega Centauri or 47 Tucanae. If the individual stars had different
masses to begin with, then they ought to be burning themselves out at
different rates and we should get rebirths. And if they did that, then
the cluster's symmetrical outline ought to have been disrupted over
time, with supernova explosions, neutron stars, black holes, planetary
nubulae, etc etc. Would you not expect that to be the case?

Boy, these globulars are not easy things to grasp...

AA

.

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