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.
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00:00Black holes are some of the universe's greatest mysteries, incredibly dense and sometimes
00:07massive voids that suck in anything and everything that passes their event horizon.
00:12Well now, a relatively nearby star cluster known as Palomar 5, located just 80,000 light
00:17years away, is revealing a cosmic secret.
00:19It's home to over 100 black holes.
00:22Palomar 5 stretches 30,000 light years across, and it's unusual for its long tidal stream,
00:27a river of stars stretching across the sky.
00:30Researchers have now used advanced simulations to track how stars in the cluster interact
00:34with black holes, finding that each of them is about 20 times the mass of the sun and
00:38could explain the strange arrangement of stars in the tidal stream.
00:41In fact, black holes make up over 20% of the cluster's mass, three times as much as anyone
00:46expected.
00:47Astronomers now predict that as Palomar 5 continues to evolve, it's likely to dissolve
00:51into 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
00:59between small and supermassive black holes in size.
01:02This discovery could also shed light on the role of star clusters in the formation of
01:06binary black hole mergers, a key puzzle in understanding cosmic black hole evolution.