'Missing' black holes holding together a galaxy have been found deep in space

Astronomers have found the first stellar-mass black hole in Omega Centauri, locked with a star in a 94-year orbit — the longest-period black hole binary yet found

By the time a star in Omega Centauri finishes a single loop around its companion, a person born at the start of that orbit would be pushing a hundred. The star takes 94 years to come around once, and the thing it circles gives off no light at all. After weighing the star’s slow arc across two decades of images, astronomers have concluded that the dark companion is a black hole of about four and a half times the Sun’s mass. It is the first stella…

'Missing' black holes holding together a galaxy have been found deep in space

The Hubble Space Telescope in Earth’s orbit. Scientists used more than 20 years of data from Hubble and the new James Webb telescope to find the stellar-mass black hole (Picture: Nasa/Cover Media) Astronomers have made a giant leap in the hunt for 10,000 missing black holes which have baffled scientists for decades. The breakthrough came after researchers studied images from Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope, along with new observations from the pow…