Stars shine light on a strange, hidden Black hole in our galaxy; see pics

Omega Centauri is about 10 times as massive as other big globular clusters – almost as massive as a small galaxy – and consists of roughly 10 million stars that are gravitationally bound. (Photo: European Space Agency)

"The most likely explanation is that a very massive object is gravitationally pulling on these stars and keeping them close to the centre. The only object that can be so massive is a black hole" says Maximilian Häberle. (Photo: ESA)

By perusing two decades’ worth of pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope archives, astrophysicists have found what could be evidence of a nearby black hole at least 8,200 times as massive as the Sun. (Photo: ESA)

An international team of astronomers used more than 500 images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope – spanning two decades of observations – to detect the largest and brightest globular cluster in the sky. (Photo: ESA)

If confirmed at a distance of 17,700 light-years, the candidate black hole resides closer to Earth than the 4.3-million-solar-mass black hole in the center of the Milky Way, which is located 26,000 light-years away. (Photo: Reuters)

Maximilian Haeberle spotted that at the centre of this dense cluster of 10 million stars, seven were moving much too fast. (Photo: Reuters)

Black holes are notoriously hard to observe. One way to detect their presence is by looking for the massive energy emitted when they gobble up gas and dust. (Photo: Reuters)

Big questions remain — including how some black holes come to be supermassive, and whether they are the result of multiple mergers, starting from stellar-mass black holes and going through intermediate masses such as that of the ω Centauri candidate. (Photo: Reuters)