linguistic:translation
Properties

At a distance of about 17,000 light-years (5,200 parsecs) from Earth, Omega Centauri is one of the few globular clusters visible to the naked eye—and appears almost as large as the full Moon when seen from a dark, rural area. It is the brightest, largest and, at 4 million solar masses, the most massive-known globular cluster associated with the Milky Way. Of all the globular clusters in the Local Group of galaxies, only Mayall II in the Andromeda Galaxy is brighter and more massive. Orbiting through the Milky Way, Omega Centauri contains several million Population II stars and is about 12 billion years old.

The stars in the core of Omega Centauri are so crowded that they are estimated to average only 0.1 light-year away from each other. The internal dynamics have been analyzed using measurements of the radial velocities of 469 stars. The members of this cluster are orbiting the center of mass with a peak velocity dispersion of 7.9 km s. The mass distribution inferred from the kinematics is slightly more extended than, though not strongly inconsistent with, the luminosity distribution.