Azernews.Az

By Alimat Aliyeva

Astronomers have carefully studied the star cluster, the visible remnant of the core of a relatively small galaxy absorbed by the expanding Milky Way 8-10 billion years ago. The object hidden in the center of this cluster surprised them, Azernews reports.

The researchers said that the unusual movement of seven stars in this cluster is convincing evidence of the existence of a medium-sized black hole in their center. They are larger than the usual class of black holes formed by the explosion of a single star, but smaller than the monsters that inhabit the cores of most galaxies.
About 15,800 light-years from Earth is a cluster called Omega Centauri, containing about 10 million stars. According to the researchers, the black hole inside it is at least 8,200 times larger than the Sun.

Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, is 4 million times more massive than the Sun. It is eclipsed by supermassive black holes in other galaxies, whose mass is billions of times that of the Sun.
"In general, the existence of intermediate—mass black holes in the Omega Centauri cluster has long been discussed, and our discovery may help resolve these disputes," says astronomer Maximilian Haberle of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.

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