Jay Strader

Some stars fizzle out like a dud firework: instead of a bright blast, just a cloud of smoke. Usually, a massive star ends with a supernova explosion, leaving a black hole. But sometimes there's no bang: the star collapses straight into a black hole, almost unnoticed.

Terzan 5 is a globular star cluster, a tight swarm of hundreds of thousands of stars squeezed into a sphere a few dozen light-years across. In such a crowd, stars exchange matter and spin each other up, and some turn into pulsars — rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit radio pulses like lighthouses. New images taken with the Karl G.

For 23 years, Hubble and James Webb have peered into the heart of Omega Centauri, a globular cluster where millions of stars crowd into a space just 150 light-years across. In this stellar beehive, the motion of the stars betrayed an invisible partner: a main-sequence star (one that has not yet left the main evolutionary branch) seemed to be tugged in a dance with an unseen weight.