If you were on a planet at the center of a globular galaxy, would the local time run slower than at the edge? i figure the surrounding starts should cancel out the gravity, so the relative time should be slower. also, what would the night sky look like from such a planet? Would it be uniformly bright in all directions (Olber’s Paradox)?
I’ve heard of globular clusters, and I’ve heard of elliptical galaxies, but I’ve never heard of globular galaxies.
For the purposes of your question, though, it doesn’t much matter. A blob of matter causes a gravitational potential, and it’s this gravitational potential that (for weak fields) determines stuff like redshift or time dilation. Qualitatively, you would get the same relativistic effects that you get from Earth’s gravitational field, described by Cecil just last week. Quantitatively, if you’re sitting at the center of a spherical ball of uniformly distributed matter with radius R and mass M, the effects of gravitational blueshift (and time dilation) will be given by (3 G M)/(2 R c[sup]2[/sup]), which works out to about four parts in a billion for a globular cluster like M22. Not a terribly large effect.
My god!
Of course, large accumulations of stars like galaxies and probably some globular clusters often have black holes in the center. So if you were right exactly in the center, the time dilation effects might be very significant indeed.
It’s full of stars.