Thought to be around 12 billion years old, Omega Centauri is a grouping of stars called a globular cluster, sparkling at a magnitude of 3.7 and seeming to be as large as the full moon on the southern night sky. Although it is visible with the unaided eye from a clear and dark observing site, you are guaranteed to get a much better and amazing view through even a modest amateur telescope at this incredible cluster of densely packed glittering stars.

Omega Centauri has been observed throughout the years both by the great astronomer Ptolemy as well as Johann Bayer, but the two labeled the cluster as a star. Much later, in the beginning of the 19th century the astronomer John Frederick William Herschel realized that Omega Centauri was actually a globular cluster.

Using modern technology, today’s astronomers uncovered the amazing secrets of this celestial beauty. The image below is taken by the 2.2-meter in diameter Max-Planck/ESO telescope, using the Wide Field Imager (WFI) mounted on it. The telescope is located at ESO’s La Silla observatory in the mountains of the southern Atacama Desert in Chile.

150 light-years across, Omega Centauri is the most massive of all the globular clusters in the Milky Way, and is estimated to contain around 10 million stars and have medium sized a black hole sitting at it’s center! It seems that observations made by both the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Observatory revealed that the stars in the center of the cluster exhibit an unusual rate of movement, leading to the conclusion that it is the gravitational effect of a black hole with a mass of approximately 40 000 times that of the Sun situated in Omega Centauri’s center.

The presence of a black hole however leads to suspicion about the nature of Omega Centauri, some believing it to be the heart of a dwarf galaxy largely destroyed when it encountered the Milky Way. Further evidence shows several generations of stars present in the cluster, while a normal globular cluster is thought to contain only stars that have formed at the same time. No matter what the truth about Omega Centauri’s origin is, it’s still an amazing celestial object.

Via physorg and ESO