... attempted¹

The tremendous computing power necessary to undertake a realistic numerical simulation of a globular cluster -- a 10⁹ year evolution of a 10⁶-body gravitational system with full stellar evolution incorporated -- has been the major impetus for the development of some of the world's fastest computers and most efficient codes. Some of my collaborators, such as Piet Hut and Simon Portegies Zwart, are leaders in this effort. The current state-of-the-art machine, the GRAPE-6, is capable of 64 teraflops, or 64 x 10¹² floating point operations per second. When finished, the GRAPE-DR will be capable of 2 x 10¹⁵ floating point operations per second.

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... Galaxy²

The very massive globular cluster G1 in Andromeda has been claimed to harbor a black hole of $\sim$20,000 M_sun (25,24). Saul Rappaport and I discussed the X-ray properties of this cluster (82) and concluded that the X-ray emission could come from Bondi accretion onto such a black hole, but could also be explained by an X-ray binary in outburst.

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... observed³

Shortly after this, supernova 2005ap was determined to have been even more luminous (94).

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