FIVE enigmatic stars in a cluster at the heart of the Milky Way have puzzled astronomers for more than a decade. For stars of their brightness, they seemed extraordinarily cool and dusty. Now, the five have turned out to be massive double stars, blowing dust into elegant pinwheel shapes as they live fast and die young.
The Quintuplet cluster, so named for its five prominent dust-shrouded red stars, lies about 26,000 light years from us. Peter Tuthill of the University of Sydney in Australia and his team used one of the twin 10-metre Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, to…
