I'm an award-winning journalist writing about the night sky and eclipses.
Stand anywhere close to the equator or in the Southern Hemisphere, and, come nightfall between April and September, a beautiful bright blob will be visible in the night sky. It's Omega Centauri , a globular cluster of 10 million densely packed stars thought to be the remains of an ancient galaxy consumed by the Milky Way . Globular clusters are considered billions of years old and primarily made up of ancient stars.
The one found in Omega Centauri—the largest and brightest of the 150 globular clusters in the Milky Way's outskirts—is far smaller. Black holes created by the destruction of stars have a mass between one and a few dozen times that of our sun, while supermassive black holes have a mass of millions or billions of times more. Omega Centauri is around 8,200 suns times the sun's mass, making it the only example of an intermediate-mass black hole ever found.
To find it, the researchers used over 500 calibration images from the Hubble Space Telescope to create an enormous catalog of the motions of 1.4 million stars within Omega Centauri. Seven fast-moving stars were found in a small region at the cluster's center—the tell-tale sign of a black hole. Next, measurements of the same seven stars will be taken using the James Webb Space Telescope and the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile. Then, work will be done to discover how the stars accelerate by studying how their orbits curve.Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.
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