Astronomers Ponder Lack of Planets in Globular Cluster

Astronomers using the Hubble telescope made the first broad search for planets far beyond our local stellar neighborhood. They trained Hubble's "eagle eye" for eight days on a swarm of 35,000 stars in 47 Tucanae, located in the southern constellation Tucana. The researchers expected to find 17 "extrasolar" planets. To their surprise, they found none. These results may be the first evidence that conditions for planet formation and evolution are different in other regions of our Milky Way Galaxy.

Credits for Hubble image: NASA and Ron Gilliland (Space Telescope Science Institute)
Credits for ground-based image: David Malin, © Anglo-Australian Observatory

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