This image shows the central region of the Omega Centauri globular cluster, where NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope found strong evidence for an intermediate-mass black hole candidate.
ESA/Hubble, NASA, Maximilian Häberle (MPIA)
Recently, astronomers made an exciting discovery about Omega Centauri. Using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, a team analyzed over 500 images – a collection spanning two decades of observations! Their goal? To find evidence of a black hole with a mass in between those of stellar and supermassive black holes, by tracking the movements of seven incredibly fast-moving stars located deep within Omega Centauri.
As NASA explains, 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 (IMBHs) are scarce, however, and are considered rare “missing links” in black hole evolution.
NASA’s astronomers have now created an “enormous catalog for the motions of these stars,” measuring the velocities for 1.4 million stars gleaned from the Hubble images of the cluster. Most of these observations were intended to calibrate Hubble’s instruments rather than for scientific use, but they turned out to be an ideal database for the team’s research efforts.
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“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.”
“This discovery is the most direct evidence so far of an IMBH in Omega Centauri,” added team lead Nadine Neumayer of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, who initiated the study, together with Anil Seth from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. “This is exciting because there are only very few other black holes known with a similar mass. The black hole in Omega Centauri may be the best example of an IMBH in our cosmic neighborhood.”
Omega Centauri is a giant globular cluster in the constellation Centaurus, easily visible from the southern hemisphere. It is the largest known globular cluster in the Milky Way galaxy, containing an estimated 10 million stars, and with a diameter of roughly 150 light-years, it is also the most massive globular cluster in our galaxy, clocking in at 4 million solar masses.
For comparison, our sun is just one star out of roughly 200 billion in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way itself is just one galaxy out of billions in the observable universe!
Omega Centauri is quite old, estimated to be around 12 billion years old, and it is far away, at a distance of about 17,000 light-years from Earth. Despite this distance, it is one of the few globular clusters that can be seen with the naked eye under dark skies, appearing as a faint, fuzzy star. Through a telescope, Omega Centauri reveals itself as a dazzling concentration of stars.
