Quote:
Originally Posted by circumpolar
Cool!
This is news to me, Although they are not deffinitive in their conclusion.
I wonder if most globular clusters will be found to contain Black Holes in their centres?
ScienceDaily 3/12/2008:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1202115328.htm
"Recent research into this intriguing celestial giant suggests that there is a medium sized black hole sitting at its centre. Observations made with the Hubble Space Telescope (see heic0809 ) and the Gemini Observatory showed that stars at the cluster's centre were moving around at an unusual rate — the cause, astronomers concluded, was the gravitational effect of a massive black hole with a mass of roughly 40 000 times that of the Sun." |
Hi Matt,
Interesting article.
I would think that as genuine GC's are mostly very old and were the first structure to form when their associated galaxies formed, that most would host many examples of stellar old age such as White dwarfs, Pulsars or Neutron stars and stellar mass Black holes. These would be the fossils of the high mass stars that formed when the GC formed.
It would seem unlikely that these GC's would have central high mass Black holes of the variety that inhabit the cores of Galaxies. The processes that formed the galactic Black holes are thought to be quite different from those that form stellar mass Black holes.
GC's are very interesting to study, they have quite unique orbital characteristics compared with the stars in the disc or arms of a Spiral.
On my recent observing trip to the Keck's our targets were the globular clusters associated with four different galaxies. My old unit instructor from Swinburne, Professor Duncan Forbes is an authority on GC's. They are his main field of research.
As they are thought to be the first structure to form when galaxies form, by studying them clues can be gleaned into galaxy formation. Also as they orbit the galactic bulge of their parent galaxy, on great elliptical orbits above and below the galactic bulge, they can be the most extended objects still gravitationally bound to their parent galaxies.
This makes them prime targets for use in probing the Dark Matter Halos of the host galaxies. I have included a link to Duncan's website. If you are interested in delving deeper into GC's you will find some interesting papers on the subject, also there is a Power Point presentation on his site, a work in progress, that has some very interesting info in it on the current thinking of his research team.
http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/dforbes
Regards
Trevor
