Annette M. N. Ferguson

On the outskirts of galaxy M83, also known as the Southern Pinwheel, a river of ancient stars drifts through the void. It stretches 81 kiloparsecs — roughly 264,000 light-years, two and a half times the diameter of our Milky Way.

In the stellar family of the Phoenix galaxy, there are five old globular clusters, and the sixth child was long considered a foundling. The object Fornax 6, located just 270 parsecs from the galaxy's center, looked like a random clump of field stars or a compact group of distant galaxies. Astronomers argued over whether it deserved to be called a cluster.