I
sometimes an astronomy it's not what you
see but what you don't see that says the
most that may be the case with 47 to
Canaan a densely packed star cluster in
the southern hemisphere astronomer Ron
gilliland surveyed 47 tuck looking for a
certain class of planets so-called hot
Jupiters because they're roughly the
same size as Jupiter but live in very
tight orbits around their stars and are
common in our part of the galaxy the
eight-day Hubble survey turned up a
surprise and 35,000 star surveyed no
planets none Gilliland's team fine-tuned
Hubble so that it could see the slide
dimming of stars that happens when a
jupiter-sized planet passes between them
and the earth in fact the search
technique was so sensitive that Hubble
did pick up the variations in several
binary star pairs but still no planets
47 Chuck is very different from our
local neighborhood stars are much closer
together and they lack the heavy metals
common in our area this result doesn't
rule out the presence of other planets
but the zero score may have a lot to say
about some of astronomy's biggest
questions I think that's telling us that
it's probably the case that stars born
into this environment very crowded low
metallicity are not likely not as likely
to have planets as those in the local
environment astronomers need more data
from 47 to County to determine whether
the clusters lack of metals or its tidal
forces or some other unknown force keeps
the hot Jupiters from forming
I think that's telling us that it's
probably the case that stars born into
this environment very crowded low
metallicity are not likely not as likely
to have planets as those in the local
environment
you