A Missing Black Hole Was Found Hiding in a Giant Star Cluster. Astronomers Think There Could Be Thousands More

Astronomers charted a star’s path over 20 years as it circled an invisible object that was rather hefty. The mysterious object was found to be a stellar-mass black hole, one of 10,000 that may be lurking within a crowded cluster of stars. Located around 18,000 light-years from Earth, Omega Centauri is a massive globular cluster filled with 10 million gravitationally bound stars. The cluster should have a large population of black holes born in the aftermath of exploding stars, and yet astronomers have found little to no evidence for them. The case has puzzled astronomers for decades, but now they may finally have their first clue to Omega Centauri’s missing black holes. In a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists say they’ve found the first of thousands of black holes in Omega Centauri. To help solve the mystery of the missing black holes, a team of astronomers scoured through archival data collected by the Hubble space telescope that spanned from 2002 to 2023. The astronomers also pulled in Webb near-infrared data to improve precision of their measurements. In doing so, the team located a star orbiting around an object that appeared to be a black hole