Omega Centauri - Jewel of the Southern Sky

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has released a beautiful new image of the massive globular cluster, Omega Centauri.

Omega Centauri contains a few million stars at a distance of around 17,000 light years from us in the constellation of Centaurus. It is around 150 light years across and is one of the larger of the 150 or so globular clusters in our Galaxy. Globular clusters are collections of older stars, with some being as much as 12 billion years old.

It appears to us as the same size as the Full Moon, and is therefore too large for FT South to capture in one image. In fact, it would require a 7 x 7 mosaic of images to capture the full cluster. The new image was collected by the Wide Field Imager (WFI), which is mounted on the 2.2-metre diameter Max-Planck/ESO telescope, at La Silla, Chile. Omega Centauri was first classified as a globular cluster by John Herschel in the early 19th century.

Many researchers believe that this cluster contains an intermediate sized black hole of around a few thousand solar masses. These objects, if confirmed, represent the missing link between stellar mass black holes (as found in X-ray binaries) and supermassive black holes (as found in active galaxies).It has also been proposed that Omega Centauri did not originally belong to the Milky Way, rather that it was the central area of a nearby dwarf galaxy, which has since been absorbed into the Milky Way.

Omega Centauri has the co-ordinates

RA 13 26 45.89

dec -47 28 36.7

meaning that it is just becoming visible in southern skies in the next few weeks.

Parts of this cluster can be imaged with FT with single filter or colour images of ~ 10 seconds recommended.

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