Keren Sharon

Astronomers used the infrared telescope and the old Hubble to discover a gaping void in the center of a galaxy in the Abell 402 cluster, as if an invisible tugboat had pulled billions of stars out of there. The missing mass equals two billion suns: it's not a cloud but a real lack of stars.

An orchestra of six distant galaxies should have played loudly, but the percussion section was missing. Astronomers pointed the James Webb Space Telescope at them, expecting to hear the sharp bursts thought to accompany star birth. Instead, they recorded only a steady hum. Each of these galaxies is so far away that its light has traveled for more than ten billion years.