Artist’s animated view of the black hole in NGC 1850 distorting its companion star

This artist’s impression shows a compact black hole 11 times as massive as the Sun and its companion, a five-solar-mass star. Although the star’s movement is not displayed in this view of the binary, the star orbits the black hole. The two objects are located in NGC 1850, a cluster of thousands of stars roughly 160 000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a Milky Way neighbour. The distortion of the star’s shape is due to the strong gravitational force exerted by the black hole. More information and download options: Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser