By Contrary to a previous report, there’s no evidence of an intermediate-mass black hole in Omega Centauri, the Milky Way’s most massive and luminous globular star cluster, a new study finds. Instead, a hive of much smaller black holes diving into and out of the tightly packed star cluster’s center can explain the movement and distribution of its many ancient stars.
“What we found in our analysis is that the data favor an extended component [of stellar-mass black holes] as opposed to an intermediate-mass black hole,” says Andrés Bañares-Hernández, an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in La Laguna, Spain. Some 10,000 to 20,000 stellar-mass black holes — adding up to between 200,000 and 300,000 times the mass of the sun — that are spread around the center of the star cluster can explain the observations, he says.
