Needle in an archival haystack (VIDEO)

University of Utah

Caption

Researchers measured the velocities of 1.4 million stars from more than 500 Hubble Space Telescope images of the cluster. Most of the images had been produced to calibrate the telescope’s instruments, rather than for scientific use. The ever-repeating views of Omega Centauri turned out to be the ideal dataset for identifying seven fast-moving stars that confirmed the intermediate-black hole’s existence and position in the cluster.

Credit

M. Häberle (MPIA)

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License

CC BY

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