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Popular ideas include a ‘terror’ of black holes and a ‘silence’ of black holes.
[Photo: NASA, ESA, S. Baum and C. O’Dea (RIT), R. Perley and W. Cotton (NRAO/AUI/NSF), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)]
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Earlier this year, astronomers went hunting for a supermassive black hole somewhere by the constellation Ara, nearly 8,000 light-years from Earth. But instead of one mega black hole, they made a startling discovery: a congregation of many mini black holes, maybe 40 or 50 of them, orbiting frenetically within the dense core of a globular star cluster.
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Never mind the implications of such colossal forces of nature found in close proximity, where they could potentially merge to create a galactic behemoth that could power a distant quasar. The more important question now is: What do you call a group of black holes?
What Do You Call a Bunch of Black Holes: A Crush? A Scream?
There are pods of whales and gaggles of geese. Now astronomers are wondering which plural term would best suit the most enigmatic entity in the cosmos.
The galaxies NGC 5257 and NGC 5258, each anchored by supermassive black holes at their centers, located in the constellation Virgo, about 300 million light-years away.Credit.NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans
What do you call a black hole? Anything you want, the old joke goes, as long as you don’t call it late for dinner. Black holes, after all, are nothing but hungry.