How do stars in a Globular Cluster manage to keep their positions and not collide together?
The second answer from Dan is completely wrong. He is talking about clusters of galaxies, which is something completely different. cyswxman is more correct, but still not completely accurate. Other than the Sun, The closest star to Earth is a triple system about 4 light years away, then there’s 1 at about 6 light years, 1 at 7.7, 1 at 8.2 etc, so the stars near us are fairly spread out – our Sun is the only star in 268 cubic light years of space (volume of a sphere 4 light years radius). Look at the link below for some details of a globular cluster. At 100 light years across this sphere has about 524,000 cubic light years, but the cluster has 100,000 stars, about 5.24 cubic light years per star on average, or 50 times the density near us. The average distance to the nearest star would be about 1 light year. However, they are still a very long way from each other so the chances of a collision are slim. They are not stationary, but are all orbiting their common centre of mass, so they wi
