Hubble and JWST Find Stellar Black Hole in Omega Centauri

Astronomers have discovered the first stellar-mass black hole within the massive globular star cluster Omega Centauri, solving a decades-long mystery about a missing population of such objects. The discovery, announced on July 14, 2026, was made by a team using more than 20 years of archival data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and recent observations from the James Webb Space Telescope.

The black hole, designated oMEGACat BH2, was detected by tracking the subtle motion of a visible star orbiting an invisible, massive companion. The team employed a technique called astrometry, which measures minute changes in a star's position over time. By analyzing Hubble data from 2002 to 2023 and supplementing it with Webb's precision measurements, researchers charted the star's path and confirmed the gravitational pull of a black hole with a mass 4.46 times that of our sun.

Lead researcher Matthew Whitaker of the University of Utah stated that the precision of the measurements was incredible, down to a fraction of a pixel on the telescopes' detectors, and that finding the black hole would not have been possible without both observatories. The discovery resolves a previous study that had...