Number 35 (Story #2), May 22, 1991 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein STUDIES OF GLOBULAR CLUSTERS indicate that it may have taken 3 billion years (rather than 1 billion years as was previously thought) for the material which formed our galaxy to collapse into a disk. A Rutherford-New South Wales-Maryland team of astronomers has measured the abundance of Fe, C, N, and O atoms in two clusters, NGC288 and NGC362, and found them to be the same. This, combined with previous plots of color-versus-luminosity for stars in the two clusters, shows that NGC288 and NGC362 differ in age by 3 billion years. (Nature, 16 May 1991.)