Quote:
Originally Posted by yusufcam
in my minds eye, i imagined it as a view of a sky with multiple suns, rather than stars.
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The article
http://io9.com/what-the-night-sky-wo...bul-1589324556 talks about 47 Tucanae as being 120 light-years across and containing 570,000 stars. (Although Wikipedia says "millions of stars"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/47_Tucanae .) By my reckoning, using 570,000 stars, that makes the mean star-to-star spacing about 1.1 light-years. Of course, the actual spacing will tend to be much closer near the core, and further apart at the periphery, but it's a number to start with, to get some context. The article says:
"At the center, our planet would be surrounded by a few hundred stars per cubic light-year (several thousand stars per cubic pc), which is thousands of times the stellar density of the Sun's neighborhood in the Milky Way's suburbs. The typical distance from our hypothetical planet to the closest star, however, still would be substantial — about 0.05 light-year (0.015 pc). In our solar system, this would place it beyond the inner edge of the Oort Cloud of comets."
For Omega Centauri, with a diameter of 150 light-years and containing about 10,000,000 stars, I calculate a mean separation of about 0.6 light-years, but again, they will be much closer at the core.
The angular diameter of the Sun, viewed from a distance of one light-year, would be about 0.03″, and at 0.05 light-year it would be about 0.6", so even near the core, most "typical" stars (apart from super-giants) would still appear as pin-points to the naked eye, but the nearest stars would be resolved as discs in a telescope. Only a couple of stars at most would be naked-eye discs - e.g. if your sun happened to be part of a tightly bound binary system.
Ain't the Universe an amazing place?!
