Page 26 - Omega Centauri News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Around the Southern CrossBy: James Smith One of the most recognisable constellations in the winter sky is the Southern Cross, also known as Crux. It is so well known that it even appears on our flag, as well as on the flags of Australia, Brazil, Samoa and Papua New Guinea. Many people assume that you can’t see the Southern Cross in the Northern Hemisphere, but that is not true. If you are north of the equator, but south of a latitude of about 25 degrees, (Hawaii, parts of north Africa and southern parts of the USA) you can still see the Southern Cross.

“There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed.” -Ray Goforth

Peering into the densely packed core of Omega Centauri, the Hubble Space Telescope provides a spell-binding look at one of the galaxy’s largest globular clusters, a swarm of more than two million suns some 17,000 light years from Earth. Easily visible to the unaided eye in the southern constellation Centaurus, Omega Centauri may harbour a black hole with about 40,000 times the mass of the Sun based on the higher-then-expected velocities of stars near its core. Astronomers have long theorised such intermediate-mass black holes may be a common feature of globular clusters, providing the gravi...

Omega Centauri in infrared light via Spitzer Space Telescope/ Wikimedia Commons. Omega Centauri, the largest globular star cluster of the Milky Way, contains about 10 million stars. This behemoth, with a diameter of 230 light-years, is 10 times more massive than a typical globular cluster. Despite all these stars, scientists released a study in 2018 that said Omega Centauri probably is not home to life. Stars pack so tightly inside Omega Centauri that the average distance between stars in the cluster’s core is 0.16 light-years, much closer than the sun’s nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri...

Advertisement James Packer’s Crown Sydney will fund a 360-degree visitor experience at Sydney Observatory under a $600,000 agreement that has ended five years of negotiations over the impact of the casino tower on the night sky. The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences received half the sum it originally requested of Crown to improve exhibition space and programs and create an immersive simulation of dark skies over Observatory Hill before it was hemmed in by the city. View of the Crown Hotel from Sydney Observatory. Credit:Wolter Peters Misdirected and powerful lighting from the CBD ha...