A Tour of a Cosmic Jekyll and Hyde

A double star system has been flipping between two alter egos, according to observations with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the NSF’s Karl F. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). This is a rare example of a cosmic object changing its behavior in this way. Astronomers found this unusual object in a dense collection of stars, the globular cluster Terzan 5, which is located in the Milky Way galaxy about 20,000 light years from Earth. One object among the millions in the cluster that caught the attention of a