Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
typodupeerror delete not in

+-   Black hole explains the enigmatic Omega Centauri-> on Thursday April 03 2008, @10:23AM esocid

Submitted by esocid on Thursday April 03 2008, @10:23AM
space
esocid writes "A new discovery has resolved some of the mystery surrounding Omega Centauri, the largest and brightest globular cluster in the sky 17 000 light-years away, located just above the plane of the Milky Way, appears almost as large as the full Moon when the cluster is seen from a dark rural area. Images obtained with the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and data obtained by the GMOS spectrograph on the Gemini South telescope in Chile show that Omega Centauri appears to harbor an elusive intermediate-mass black hole in its center.

Exactly how Omega Centauri should be classified has always been a contentious topic. It was first listed in Ptolemy's catalogue nearly two thousand years ago as a single star. Edmond Halley reported it as a nebula in 1677. In the 1830s the English astronomer John Herschel was the first to recognise it as a globular cluster. Now, more than a century later, this new result suggests Omega Centauri is not a globular cluster at all, but a dwarf galaxy stripped of its outer stars. According to scientists, these intermediate-mass black holes could turn out to be baby supermassive black holes. "We may be on the verge of uncovering one possible mechanism for the formation of supermassive black holes. Intermediate-mass black holes like this could be the seeds of full-sized supermassive black holes.""

Link to Original Source
submission

This discussion was created for logged-in users only, but now has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.
People who have no faults are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.