Beatriz Barbuy

In the crowded center of the Milky Way, individual stars are hard to pick out, but that's exactly where Patchick 126 hides — a faint cluster that has long resisted confident classification. Astronomers pointed the infrared spectrograph IGRINS and the Hubble Space Telescope at it to study its chemistry and age in detail for the first time.

Hidden in the dense swarm of stars at the center of the Milky Way lies the globular cluster Tonantzintla 2. It went unnoticed for decades, yet it holds the key to the earliest history of our galaxy.