https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vgh5xw/does_omega_centauri_have_exoplanets/
created by [deleted] on 20/06/2022 at 09:07 UTC
4 upvotes, 2 top-level comments (showing 2)
I don't mean habitable planets. I'm just asking about any kind of terrestrial planets or gas-giants. I tried looking it up and couldn't find confirmation on the existence of exo-planets in the globular cluster. I was hoping there might be some astronomers out there with an answer.
Comment by filladelp at 20/06/2022 at 17:27 UTC*
8 upvotes, 1 direct replies
It has 10 million stars, so I’d put my money on “yes”, given what we know so far about how many stars have planets. There are probably millions of planets in Omega Centauri. I don’t know if any have been found by humans.
Mostly Omega Centauri is just too far away for detection. Here’s a chart of the distance of current exoplanets found - you and see it mostly falls off after 1500 parsecs (roughly 5000 ly). Omega Centauri is 17,000 light years away.
Comment by ArcturusStream at 22/06/2022 at 08:00 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The original mindset on exoplanets in globular clusters was that they would not survive long beyond formation, as the stars as so closely packed in, the dynamical instabilities would rip planets apart. This is changing and people are now considering looking for exoplanets in GCs, but to my knowledge none have been found yet.
The second complication is that exoplanetary signals are small compared to their host stars, on the order of a few percent at the largest and generally much smaller than that. This is for planets around a star that can be singled out. For stars in GCs, it ranges from hard to impossible to spatially resolve and isolate single stars, and so a single planetary signal would have to compete with the light from many many stars at the same time. Alternatively, multiple planetary signals around different stars all clumped together into a single observation would be difficult to disentangle and might be hard to correctly identify.
