At the heart of a glob of stars drifting through the Milky Way lurks a beast.
Messier 4 is the closest globular cluster to Earth. Led by astronomer Eduardo Vitral of the Space Telescope Science Institute, a team of researchers used two powerful space telescopes, Hubble and Gaia, to take a close look at the stars inside it. They tracked the movements of around 6,000 stars in the cluster, to see if they could link those movements to orbits around a small, dense mass.
frameborder="0″ allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen> To try to narrow it down, the team conducted modeling, removing stars to see how that alters the shape of the mass. Removing one particularly fast-moving star spread the mass out over a greater distance, as you might see from a swarm of smaller black holes and neutron stars. Further modeling showed that the mass is not spread across a large enough region of space to be such a swarm.
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