In early 2007, Ren\u00e9 Hudec was in Building D of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, thumbing through roomfuls of floor-to-ceiling cabinets that look more like a vast record collection than an academic archive. Each paper sleeve holds a glass plate, most of which are 8 by 10 inches, a historic photographic record of the cosmos from before the age of sophisticated digital detectors. Hudec, an astrophysicist at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Ond\u0159ejov, was searching for a specific pattern of stars that he had memorized, a region that features a binary system of mammoth yet compact objects. There, two supermassive black holes and their surrounding accretion disks are locked in a\u00a0dance that will eventually merge them into one. Hudec was tracking when this system, known as OJ 287, flared in brightness.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Read full original article<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Quanta Magazine has published an interesting popular article describing the long-term work of Ren\u00e9 Hudec – emeritus researcher at the Stellar Department of the Astronomical<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5556,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,39,35,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-department","category-hotstars","category-news","category-outreach"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stel.asu.cas.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stel.asu.cas.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stel.asu.cas.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stel.asu.cas.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stel.asu.cas.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5554"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/stel.asu.cas.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5568,"href":"https:\/\/stel.asu.cas.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5554\/revisions\/5568"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stel.asu.cas.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stel.asu.cas.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stel.asu.cas.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stel.asu.cas.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/stel.asu.cas.cz\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/rene-hudec-article-1024x433.jpeg\")
Ren\u00e9 Hudec has visited more than 70 plate collections around the world, and estimates there could be 10 million surviving glass plates. (Courtesy of Rene Hudec)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nMore information<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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