Black holes hold some of the universe’s greatest mysteries, with giant empty spots in space sucking in whatever enters their gravitational pull. However, the mystery is now growing as astronomers are now saying there could be a swarm of black holes moving across the Milky Way.
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00:00Black holes hold some of the universe's greatest mysteries, with giant seemingly empty spots
00:09in space, sucking in whatever enters their gravitational pull.
00:12However, the mystery is now growing, as astronomers are now saying there could be a swarm of black
00:17holes moving across the Milky Way.
00:19A stellar cluster named Palomar 5 includes a cascade of stars stretching over an area
00:24some 30,000 light years in length.
00:26It's what's called a tidal stream, forming in a different and unknown way from normal
00:30globular clusters, and Palomar 5 is the only one we've found so far.
00:35Experts theorized that black holes might have something to do with tidal stream cluster
00:39formation, so they included them in simulated models, and the resulting data revealed that
00:43a cluster of black holes within Palomar 5 could be to blame for its wild orientation,
00:48with the researchers adding, quote, the number of black holes is roughly three times larger
00:52than expected from the number of stars in the cluster, and it means that more than 20
00:56percent of the total cluster mass is made up of black holes.
01:00Each of the black holes within Palomar 5 is around 20 times the mass of the sun, and in
01:04around a billion years, the simulation revealed that only the black holes will remain, providing
01:09clues about how tidal streams form, and why we haven't found any more of them.