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  • 2 days ago
Black holes are some of the universe's greatest mysteries, incredibly dense and sometimes massive void that suck in anything and everything that passes their event horizons. Now a relatively nearby star cluster known as Palomar 5, is revealing a cosmic secret: it's home to over 100 black holes.
Transcript
00:00black holes are some of the universe's greatest mysteries incredibly dense and sometimes massive
00:07voids that suck in anything and everything that passes their event horizon well now a relatively
00:13nearby star cluster known as palomar 5 located just 80 000 light years away is revealing a
00:18cosmic secret it's home to over 100 black holes palomar 5 stretches 30 000 light years across
00:25and it's unusual for its long tidal stream a river of stars stretching across the sky researchers have
00:30now used advanced simulations to track how stars in the cluster interact with black holes finding
00:35that each of them is about 20 times the mass of the sun and could explain the strange arrangement
00:39of stars in the tidal stream in fact black holes make up over 20 of the cluster's mass three times
00:45as much as anyone expected astronomers now predict that as palomar 5 continues to evolve it's likely
00:50to dissolve into a stellar stream of black holes with experts adding that studying clusters like
00:55these could help us understand the elusive middleweight black holes which are situated between
00:59small and supermassive black holes in size this discovery could also shed light on the role of star
01:04clusters in the formation of binary black hole mergers a key puzzle in understanding cosmic black hole
01:11natural evolution

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