Omega Centauri: Globes of the southern sky.

Omega Centauri is one of the most beautiful pearls in the southern hemisphere sky, perfectly illustrated in the latest ESO photo. Containing millions of stars, this globular cluster lies about 17,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus.

Appearing with a brightness of 3.7 and nearly as large as the southern full moon, Omega Centauri is visible with the naked eye from a clear and dark observation position. Although through a conventional telescope, this globular cluster appears as a pearl filled with twinkling stars. However, astronomers need professional telescopes to discover the incredible secret of this beautiful globular cluster.

This new image is based on data collected with Wide Field Imager (WFI) on a 2.2-meter Max-Planck / ESO telescope, located at ESO's La Silla observatory on the arid mountains of sa Atacam in southern Chile.Omega Centauri is about 150 light-years across and is the largest globular cluster in the Milky Way. It contains about 10 million stars.

Omega Centauri globules - containing about 10 million stars - with all the inherent beauty shown on the photo by the WFI camera by ESO La Silla Observatory. The image shows the center of the globular cluster - the size of a full moon (half a degree). North at the top, east on the left. (Photo: ESO / EIS)

Omega Centauri has always been a favorite observation target throughout history. Both the great astronomer Ptolemy and Johann Bayer put this globular star in a star category. Until later, in the early 19th century, an English astronomer, John Frederick William Herschel (son of the discoverer of Uranus), realized that Omega Centauri was in fact a globular cluster. Globular clusters are the oldest star groups found in halo around galaxies like the Milky Way.Omega Centauri is about 12 billion years old.

Recent research on this giant space shows that there is a medium sized black hole at its center. Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and Gemini Observatory show that stars at the center of the star cluster move at unusual rates - the cause, according to astronomers, is the gravitational impact of a black hole weighing 40,000 times the Sun.

The appearance of this black hole is one of the reasons why astronomers suspect Omega Centauri is an impostor. Some believe that in fact the center of a dwarf galaxy is destroyed when it collides with the Milky Way. Some other evidence suggests that many generations of stars exist in this space cluster - an unexpected thing in a globular cluster, thought to contain only stars formed at a time. Regardless of what the truth is, this amazing object offers a beautiful snowy night sky scene for amateur and professional astronomers.