Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2022

MARCH-APRIL 2022 T his image shows NGC 1850, a cluster of thousands of stars roughly 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a Milky Way neighbour. The reddish filaments surrounding the cluster, made of vast clouds of hydrogen, are believed to be the remnants of supernova explosions. The image is an overlay of observations conducted in visible light with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and NASA/ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The VLT captured the wide field of the image and the filaments, while the central cluster was imaged by the HST. [ESO, NASA/ESA/R. Gilmozzi/S. Casertano, J. Schmidt] have found one, you are well on your way to discovering many oth- ers, in different clusters.” This first “criminal” tracked down by the team turned out to be roughly 11 times as massive as our Sun. The smoking star in this cluster with a magnify- ing glass in one hand trying to find some evidence for the presence of black holes but without seeing them directly,” says Sara Saracino from the Astrophysics Research Institute of Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, who led the research pub- lished in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . “The one uncovered now is just one of the wanted criminals, but when you