Using the joint NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope in low-Earth orbit, an international team of astronomers has discovered a rare black hole within Omega Centauri — the largest and brightest known globular cluster in the Milky Way. Globular clusters are large collections of stars and other cosmic material that can span from 10 to 300 light-years across and have masses ranging from 1,000 to greater than 1,000,000 solar masses.
The team, led by Maximilian Häberle of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, used over 500 images collected by Hubble during the last two decades to detect seven rapidly moving stars in the inner regions of the globular cluster. The movement of these stars, their location and the environment surrounding them, allowed scientists to determine the location and existence of the black hole.