Data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope have located the first missing black hole in the massive globular star cluster Omega Centauri, a discovery that evaded astronomers for decades.
Omega Centauri left astronomers stumped, as it should be filled with black holes left behind by exploding stars. Yet the population of black holes has avoided detection until now, according to findings published Monday from a team of astronomers.
The discovery was made possible by an approach called astrometry, which measures very small movements in stars over time. The team used 20 years of Hubble archival data along with recent Webb data to further refine their measurements, locating a star orbiting an invisible object that could only be a black hole.
“The precision of these measurements is incredible, down to a fraction of a pixel on Hubble and Webb’s detectors,” said Matthew Whitaker of the University of Utah, lead author of the paper, according to NASA. “It would not have been possible to find this black hole without these two space telescopes.”
