Using data from Hubble, scientists looked into the future for 10,000 years

A color shot taken with a Wide Field Camera 3 camera, located aboard the NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows the central part of the giant cluster of Omega Centauri stars. All the stars in the picture move in a random direction, like a swarm of bees. Astronomers used the tremendous resolution of the Hubble telescope to determine the positions of stars from 2002 to 2006. Based on these measurements, they can predict the movement of stars in the future. The lower part of the picture shows the future position of the stars located on a fragment of the upper part highlighted in a frame. Each strip is a movement of a star in the next 600 years. Movement between two points corresponds to approximately 30 years.
Photo: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

The globular cluster of stars Omega Centauri attracts the attention of sky researchers since the ancient astronomer Ptolemy first cataloged it. However, Ptolemy believed that it was one star. He did not know that the “star” is in fact a swarm of almost 10 million stars located in the orbit of a common center of gravity.

The stars are located so tightly that scientists had to wait for the power of Hubble to look deep into the "hive" and select individual stars. The picture from Hubble was so detailed that you can see the movement of the stars in a relatively short period of time.

Accurate measurement of the trajectories of stars will help to understand how star clusters formed in the early Universe, and whether a black hole is located at the center of mass, about 10,000 times more massive than our Sun.
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By analyzing images taken over a four-year period with a Hubble camera, astronomers made the most accurate measurements of the movement of more than 100,000 stars from the cluster. To date, this is the largest study of the motion of stars in all clusters.

Based on the data obtained, a movie was made that simulates the movement of stars in the next 10,000 years.