A journey to NGC 1850

Sit back, relax and enjoy this journey to NGC 1850, a cluster of thousands of stars roughly 160 000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a Milky Way neighbour.

Among many stars, this cluster is home to a black hole 11 times as massive as the Sun and to the five-solar-mass star orbiting it. By looking at the star’s orbit, a team of astronomers were able to infer the presence of the black hole, making it the first small black hole outside of our galaxy to be found this way. For this discovery, the team used the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.