14/07/2026 04:23 - Tecnologia
As reported by Infobae, an international team of scientists has achieved a historic milestone for astrophysics: identifying the first stellar-mass black hole in Omega Centauri, the largest globular cluster in the Milky Way.
To understand the magnitude of this discovery, it is key to know that galaxies host enormous swarms of stars called globular clusters. In these spaces, millions of stars are grouped together by intense gravity. Omega Centauri is the largest in our galaxy, and finding a hidden black hole there solves a long-standing enigma about stellar evolution.
The discovery, published in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters, was made by detecting a star orbiting an invisible object. Calculations indicate that this black hole has a mass of 4.46 times that of the Sun, while its companion star has 0.78 solar masses and is in an advanced stage of its life.
To achieve this feat, the scientific team used a technique called astrometry, which involves measuring the movement of stars with extreme precision. They analyzed more than twenty years of images from the Hubble Space Telescope, combined with recent observations from the James Webb Telescope.
Matthew Whitaker, a researcher at the University of Utah and lead author of the study, highlighted in a NASA statement: With Hubble and Webb data, we were able to see the motion of the visible star in the dense environment of Omega Centauri. The precision of these measurements is extraordinary.
The precision was so high that shifts smaller than the size of a single pixel in the telescope cameras were detected. No X-ray or radio emission was detected either, which is expected because there is no flow of matter between the two bodies.
This discovery demonstrates that stellar-mass black holes can survive in dense environments and are not all expelled, as previous models suggested. Anil Seth, co-author of the study, stated: Now we know that a metal-poor star can form a black hole like this, and we need to figure out how that process occurs.
The team has their sights set on the future, hoping that instruments like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will allow them to identify more similar systems. A giant step to unravel the mysteries of the universe!
Alfredo S. Quiroga
