02 February, 1998. Measurements of parallaxes made with the Hipparcos satellite (see Chapter 13) suggest that the Galaxy may be younger than previously thought. Hipparcos shows that some stars and nearby open clusters are closer and therefore their stars not as bright. Distances to globular clusters based on such stars therefore alter our view of the luminosities and thus of the ages of the globular cluster stars. One study suggests that globular clusters might be as young as 12 billion years.