An astronomical term that refers to a roughly spherical cluster of gravitationally bound stars. A globular cluster has anything from tens of thousands to a million individual stars and can be ten to hundreds of light years across.

The Milky Way has around 200 globular clusters which orbit the Galactic Core with a highly elliptical path that is not confined to the Galactic Disk. Stars in globular clusters tend to have low concentrations of heavy elements, implying that the stars in globular clusters are older than the stars in the Galactic Disk.

It was from the observation of globular clusters that Harlow Shapely was able to determine the Sun's position in the Milky Way.

A list of local globular clusters (local meaning within our galaxy :) is at:

  http://physun.physics.mcmaster.ca/~harris/mwgc.dat