- University of Utah astronomers discovered a stellar-mass black hole in the Omega Centauri star cluster.
- They used NASA’s Hubble and Webb telescopes to measure star movements over time.
- The black hole, oMEGACat BH-2, has a surprising low mass and long orbital period.
SALT LAKE CITY — In a discovery that has eluded and puzzled astronomers for centuries, University of Utah astronomers harnessed archival data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to locate the first stellar-mass black hole in the massive globular star cluster Omega Centauri.
The team’s findings, published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, challenge the very idea of how black holes form within environments like Omega Centauri.
Composed of 10 million gravitationally bound stars, models suggested the Omega Centauri star cluster contained about 10,000 smaller, stellar-mass black holes. The problem?…