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Spotted: A Short-Period Star Orbiting a Massive Black Hole (2 of 4)

Caption: The two W. M. Keck Telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, observe the galactic center. The lasers are used to create an artificial star in Earth's upper atmosphere, which is then employed to measure the blurring effects of the lower atmosphere (the effect that makes the stars twinkle in the night sky). The blurring gets corrected in real time with the help of a deformable mirror. This is the so-called adaptive optics technique. This image relates to a paper that appeared in the Oct. 5, 2012, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by Leo Meyer at University of California, Los Angeles in Los Angeles, Calif., and colleagues was titled, "The Shortest-Known–Period Star Orbiting Our Galaxy's Supermassive Black Hole."

Credit: Image © Ethan Tweedie Photography

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