Type

Intermediate mass

Location

In the constellation Centaurus

Finder Chart

Distance

17,000 light-years

Mass

40,000 times the mass of the Sun

Size

Diameter 150,000 miles (240,000 km), about two-thirds of the distance from Earth to the Moon

Discovery Methods

• Measuring the motions of stars

Omega Centauri

A photo of Omega Centauri from a telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile encompasses about 300,000 of the cluster's stars.

A Hubble Space Telescope image of the starry center of Omega Centauri.

Hubble peered deep into Omega Centauri to snap a picture of about 50,000 stars near the cluster's center.

This document was last modified: November 11, 2011.