SCIENCE-fiction illustrators love to imagine what the sky would look like
from a planet circling a star in one of the tight concentrations of hundreds of
thousands of stars known as globular clusters. But these images of star-studded
heavens will probably always be fantasy. Clusters just don’t seem to suit
planets.
Over the past five years, astronomers have been finding more and more planets
outside our Solar System. Where we view the orbit edge-on, we can sometimes see
the planet passing in front of its parent star every few days, causing dips in
the star’s brightness.
To check for planets…
