According to astrophysicists, the Palomar 5-star cluster, located around 80,000 light-years distant from Earth, may contain a concealed swarm of over 100 stellar-mass black holes. This star cluster, spanning 30,000 light-years, has piqued curiosity because to its peculiar structure and lengthy tidal stream of stars.
Palomar 5 is classed as a dense and spherical globular cluster, with an estimated 100,000 to 1 million old stars. These clusters are sometimes referred to as ‘fossils’ from the early Universe. Around 150 of them are found in the Milky Way, allowing astronomers to explore a variety of cosmic phenomena such as dark matter and galaxies’ histories.
However, a novel type of star creation called as tidal streamers is receiving greater attention. These are lengthy expanses of stars spread throughout the sky, and their finding has been made easier by the Gaia satellite observatory’s exact three-dimensional mapping of the Milky Way.
Astrophysicist Mark Gieles of the University of Barcelona stated in 2021, “We don’t know how these streams arise, but one theory is that they are damaged star clusters. Palomar 5 is the unique instance in which a star system is linked to a stream, making it a Rosetta Stone for understanding stream creation. Palomar 5 is distinguished by its sparsely scattered stars and huge tidal stream, which covers more than 20 degrees of the sky.
The simulations incorporated the presence of black holes, as new data indicates that black holes within globular clusters might gravitationally interact with stars, ejecting them into space. The team’s findings indicated that Palomar 5 is likely to contain many more black holes than originally estimated, which might explain the cluster’s current form.
“The number of black holes is roughly three times larger than expected,” according to Gieles, “with more than 20 percent of the cluster’s total mass made up of black holes.” These black holes, each around 20 times the mass of the Sun, were created by supernova explosions during the cluster’s early phases of existence.
According to a revolutionary study, Palomar 5, a globular cluster, would collapse in around a billion years, leaving behind a path of black holes orbiting the Milky Way’s core. This finding implies that additional clusters may experience a similar fate, emphasizing the relevance of globular clusters in detecting black hole collisions and intermediate-mass black holes.
these clusters,” according to a Science Alert story.