clipped from: www.randybrewer.net   
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clipped from: mcdonaldobservatory.org   
A well-known star cluster that glitters with the light of millions of stars may have a mysterious dark object tugging at its core, according to researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.

Astronomer Karl Gebhardt has teamed up with recent Ph.D. graduate Eva Noyola to find evidence for a medium-size black hole at the core of Omega Centauri, one of the largest and most massive globular star clusters orbiting the Milky Way galaxy. The finding will appear in the April 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

The black hole in Omega Centauri is estimated to be about 40,000 times the mass of the Sun, falling in between the masses of supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies like the Milky Way and stellar-mass black holes that result when the most massive stars explode as supernovae.

Measuring the speed of the stars swirling near the cluster’s center with the Gemini Observatory, the astronomers found that the stars closer to the core are moving faster than the stars farther away.