Mattia Libralato

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.

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.