Extraordinary black hole found in neighboring galaxy

Astronomers have discovered a black hole unlike any other. At one hundred thousand solar masses, it is smaller than the black holes we have found at the centers of galaxies, but bigger than the black holes that are born when ...

Hubble uncovers concentration of small black holes

Globular clusters are extremely dense stellar systems, in which stars are packed closely together. They are also typically very old—the globular cluster that is the focus of this study, NGC 6397, is almost as old as the ...

Astronomers crack mystery of the 'monster stars'

(Phys.org) -- In 2010 scientists discovered four 'monster' sized stars, with the heaviest more than 300 times as massive as our Sun. Despite their incredible luminosity, these exotic objects, located in the giant star cluster ...

First transiting planets in a star cluster discovered

(Phys.org) —All stars begin their lives in groups. Most stars, including our Sun, are born in small, benign groups that quickly fall apart. Others form in huge, dense swarms that survive for billions of years as stellar ...

The survivors of a 13 billion year old massacre

(PhysOrg.com) -- Our Milky Way galaxy is surrounded by some 200 compact groups of stars, containing up to a million stars each. At 13 billion years of age, these globular clusters are almost as old as the universe itself ...

Dense stellar clusters may foster black hole megamergers

When LIGO's twin detectors first picked up faint wobbles in their respective, identical mirrors, the signal didn't just provide first direct detection of gravitational waves—it also confirmed the existence of stellar binary ...

Hubble's close encounter with the Tarantula

(Phys.org) -- Turning its eye to the Tarantula Nebula, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken this close-up of the outskirts of the main cloud of the Nebula.

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