#omega centauri

 Omega Centauri

ω Centauri, NGC 5139 // Wolfgang Promper

NGC 5139, Omega Centauri

A team of astronomers used the power of time: analyzing 20-plus years of Hubble archival data and incorporating more recent Webb data to track the small movements of the cluster’s stars. From their analysis, they detected a visible star (highlighted in the image) orbiting an invisible object so hefty that it must be a black hole: https://news.stsci.edu/3SUGysD

Millions of Stars in Omega Centauri ©

"Does an old, red globular cluster have any hot, blue stars? The rightmost picture, taken by the Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope in ultraviolet light, shows that indeed it does. Pictured, Omega Centauri is the largest known globular cluster in our galaxy, containing well over a million stars. Many of these stars are evident in the visible light photograph on the left. When photographed in ultraviolet light, however, different and less numerous stars emerge, as evident on the photograph on the right. Most of these stars are thought to have evolved past the current stage of our Sun. These stars no longer fuse hydrogen to helium in their core but rather fuse helium into carbon. These stars will soon shed their outer envelopes and end up as smoldering carbon embers known as white dwarf stars."

Omega Centauri

The Beehive - where Mars is now - is what's called an open star cluster. It contains maybe 1,000 stars. But Omega Centauri, the largest globular star cluster of the Milky Way, contains about 10 million stars. This behemoth, with a diameter of about 160 light-years, is 10 times more massive than a typical globular cluster. It’s easily seen from the Southern Hemisphere and even visible from the southern half of the United States in the late evenings of May and June. Read more about this huge and unusual globular cluster.