Science, Space and Technology News 2024
An international team of astronomers has used more than 500 images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope – spanning two decades of observations – to detect seven fast-moving stars in the innermost region of the globular star cluster Omega Centauri, the largest and brightest globular cluster in the sky. These stars provide new compelling evidence for the presence of the gravitational pull from an intermediate-mass black hole tugging on them. Only a few other IMBH candidates have been found to date.
The black hole in Omega Centauri is estimated to be 8,200 times that of our sun. If confirmed, it is closer to Earth than the 4.3-million-solar-mass black hole in the center of the. That black hole is 26,000 light-years away, while Omega Centauri is 17,700 light-years from us. Most known black holes are either extremely massive, like the supermassive black holes that lie at the cores of large galaxies, or relatively lightweight, with a mass of under 100 times that of the Sun. Intermediate-mass black holes are scarce, however, and are considered rare “missing links” in black hole evolution.
“We discovered seven stars that should not be there,” explained Maximilian Häberle of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, who led this investigation. “They are moving so fast that they would escape the cluster and never come back. The most likely explanation is that a very massive object is gravitationally pulling on these stars and keeping them close to the center. The only object that can be so massive is a black hole, with a mass at least 8,200 times that of our sun.
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