Originally posted by: Scruffy
* According to This source, there are 100 stars per cubic parsec in the core of the Milky Way. That means the mean distance between stars is 0.7 light years.** But the galactic core is not the friendly kind of place where Tauntauns and Wampas can evolve ... it's got radiation, and occasional bursts of energy that make the Death Star's superlaser look like a trickle.
** My math is probably wrong.
* According to This source, there are 100 stars per cubic parsec in the core of the Milky Way. That means the mean distance between stars is 0.7 light years.** But the galactic core is not the friendly kind of place where Tauntauns and Wampas can evolve ... it's got radiation, and occasional bursts of energy that make the Death Star's superlaser look like a trickle.
** My math is probably wrong.
But it's a good try.
Each star in this cubic evenly distributed space is adjacent to six stars at a range of 0.7 light years, but it's also adjacent to six stars at (0.7^2+0.7^2)^1/2 ly (the diagonals on the faces of the cube) and a further EIGHT stars at [(0.7^2)x3]^1/2 ly (the "internal diagonals" of the cube). This gives a mean average of 0.994 light years between stars, which I find to be an unintuitive and surprising result given the size of a parsec (3.26 light years).
Steve