14 DAY TRIAL // A group of astronomers managed to use the NASA Hubble Space Telescope recently for peering some 10,000 years into the future of a globular cluster in the Milky Way, called Omega Centauri.
Using the immense observations power that the renowned instrument has, experts were capable of making out the individual paths and motion speeds of several individual stars in the cluster.
The cluster was discovered by Greek astronomer Ptolemy some two millennia ago, but the scientists thought that Omega Centauri was a single star. The cluster actually contains 10 million stars.
In the new scientific study, the researchers who used Hubble sought to determine how stars will move within the galactic structure over the foreseeable future, which in astronomical terms means 10,000 years.
The Hubble just got new sets of eyes in may last year, when space shuttle Atlantis spent 11 days repairing the venerable observatory. The new capabilities made this telescope the instrument of choice for the researchers conducting the work.
The science group also wanted to determine whether predictions that a large black hole, weighing some 10,000 times more than the Sun, was lurking in the cluster were true or not.
“It takes sophisticated computer programs to measure the tiny shifts in the positions of the stars that occur over a period of just four years,” explains space scientist Jay Anderson.
He holds an appointment as an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. He was the leader of the new study. Another co-leader was fellow Institute astronomer Roeland van der Marel, Science Blog reports.
“Ultimately, though, it is Hubble’s razor-sharp vision that is the key to our ability to measure stellar motions in this cluster,” Anderson explains.
“With Hubble, you can wait three or four years and detect the motions of the stars more accurately than if you were using a ground-based telescope and were waiting 50 years,” his colleague adds.
Omega Centauri, which is located in the constellation Centaurus, is just one of hundreds of such globular clusters that exist in the Milky Way.
Analyzing these structures may yield more clues as to how the galaxy will look like in the near future, scientists say.