The globular cluster Omega Centauri shines in the featured photo on the website Astronomy Picture of the Day this Thursday (16). It is about 15,000 light-years from us and is home to approximately 10 million stars much older and bulkier than the Sun.
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Cataloged as NGC 5139, this star cluster is the largest and brightest of the known globular clusters in the Milky Way’s halo. Most of them contain stars of the same age and composition, but Omega Centauri is an exception.
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Inside, there are populations of stars with different chemical compositions and ages, which suggest that it is the remnant of the core of an ancient galaxy that merged with our own.
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In the photo, the red giant stars stand out with their yellowish glow. The name indicates that they are main sequence stars (that is, they convert hydrogen into helium through nuclear fusion in their cores), and that they are in the final stage of their respective evolutionary processes.
The Omega Centauri star cluster
Considered the largest stellar cluster in the Milky Way, Omega Centauri has a diameter of almost 230 light years, which makes it 10 times more massive than a common globular cluster. The stars at the core of the cluster are so tightly packed together that they occasionally collide with one another — and given Omega Centauri’s age, it’s likely that thousands of collisions have already occurred.
As it is of the globular type, the Omega Centauri cluster orbits the Milky Way outside the galactic disk, while the stars inside it are held together with the help of gravity. It is one of the few globular clusters in our galaxy visible to the naked eye.
Its name was chosen by the German astronomer Johann Bayer in 1603, who ranked it as the 24th brightest object in the constellation Centaurus, the Centaurus. It can be observed in the sky of the southern hemisphere as a bright and diffuse shape, which makes it easily confused with the appearance of comets.
Read the article on Canaltech.
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