To take a closer look, he and his team won four hours of prized observing time on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, one of the world’s most powerful telescopes. Within the first half hour, he knew they were onto something big. VLT’s keen eye clearly picked out photons originating from both oxygen and sulfur atoms, something Gänsicke and his colleagues had never seen before. “It was exceptional,” he said. They could also tell that the star wasn’t naked, but sat clothed in a rotating disk of gas, which also contained hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur.