Presentation description

Globular clusters are dense collections of stars that are gravitationally bound. Omega Centauri (ω Cen) is the most massive globular cluster in the Milky Way, and has an estimated age of 12 Gyr. During the formation of the cluster, it is expected that tens of thousands of stellar-mass black holes would form, yet none have been observed in ω Cen to date. Black holes play an important role in cluster evolution, and are potential sites for black hole mergers that produce observed gravitational waves. Using one of the most extensive kinematic catalogues of stars ever created for ω Cen, we attempt to unveil the stellar-mass black hole population by finding stars orbiting unseen objects, and fitting for their orbital parameters, including the unseen companions mass. To do this, we use Markov Chain Monte Carlo to fit model orbits to the astrometric data. We have shown that our model is unbiased, and can recover the dark companion mass on synthetically created data. We also report the detection of an object that could be a neutron star, or the first detection of a stellar mass black hole in ω Cen.