Globular Cluster Omega Centauri

Peering through the thick dust clouds of our galaxy's "bulge" (the myriads of stars surrounding its centre), and revealing an amazing amount of detail, a team of astronomers has unveiled an unusual mix of stars in the stellar grouping known as Terzan 5. Never observed anywhere in the bulge before, this peculiar "cocktail" of stars suggests that Terzan 5 is in fact one of the bulge's primordial building blocks, most likely the relic of a proto-galaxy that merged with the Milky Way during its very early days. "The history of the Milky Way is encoded in its oldest fragments, globular clusters and other systems ... Read Full Story

New episode every Monday! Is that all? Fact Sheet: Hercules Globular Cluster Aliases: Messier 13, M13, NGC 6205, Great Globular Cluster in Hercules. Location: Above the Milky Way’s galactic plane, inside its halo. Distance from Earth: 25,000 Light Years. Mass: 600,000 Solar Masses (10 36 kg). Diameter: 150 Light Years. More information: The Hercules Globular Cluster is in the constellation of Hercules and has a close neighboring globular cluster, M92 which is fainter than M13. Globular clusters are densely packed regions of stars. In the central cores of globular clusters the density of stars is around 100 stars within 3 light years, compared to ... Read Full Story

Here is the transcript for my podcast about how to see the Broken Engagement Ring, globular cluster M68, and the Helix Galaxy this week. Check out the Astronomy.com's interactive star chart — StarDome — to see an accurate map of your sky. It'll help you locate some of this week's key targets. Astronomy magazine subscribers have access to a slew of cool functions with StarDome PLUS. Each week, I highlight three different night-sky targets for you to see: One object you can find with your naked eyes or through binoculars One object to find with a small telescope One deep-sky object to find with ... Read Full Story

With long time debates by scientists regarding the existence of middleweight black holes, the latest data that was gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope instruments and the Gemini South Chili telescope have shown us that the Omega Centauri, the largest star cluster in the sky, is observed to possibly contain an intermediate-mass black hole in its center. It is considered a prospective missing link in the evolution of our universe’s first stellar black holes, ending with the supermassive black holes where most major galaxies exist. In between are the possible middleweight black holes–never before detected. The interesting thing about black holes is that they ... Read Full Story

Could the Milky Way really be full of rogue, planet devouring black holes? It looks that way. A recent simulation of black holes merger revealed that there could be literally hundreds of rogue black holes scattered across the Milky Way galaxy. Each one would weigh several thousand times the mass of the sun, so if these bad guys exist—why haven’t we identified them already? “Rogue black holes like this would be very difficult to spot,” says Vanderbilt astronomer Kelly Holley-Bockelmann. “Unless it's swallowing a lot of gas, about the only way to detect the approach of such a black hole would be to observe ... Read Full Story