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Science Quickly

Astronomers Find an Unexpected Bumper Crop of Black Holes

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.2639 Ratings

🗓️ 12 August 2021

⏱️ 4 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In trying to explain the spectacular star trails of the star cluster Palomar 5, astronomers stumbled on a very large trove of black holes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

0:05.8

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

0:11.0

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

0:19.6

To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yawcot.co.j.j.p. That's y-A-K-U-L-T-C-O-J-P.

0:28.4

When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

0:32.7

This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher in Tal-Jata.

0:38.9

The universe is littered with black holes, but where exactly they're all hiding? Well,

0:44.2

that's a little harder to say. Our current inventory of black holes is still highly incomplete.

0:51.2

Yale astronomer Priya Natarajan says black holes present unique challenges to those

0:56.0

keeping count. These are dark objects that have such peculiar properties that you can never

1:01.0

directly quite image them like we image galaxies, and therefore we have to infer their presence indirectly.

1:09.0

Natarajan and her colleagues recently predicted there might be a large population of previously

1:13.4

undetected supermassive black holes, just wandering around galaxies.

1:18.1

But supermassive black holes are, as the name implies, massively large, which makes them

1:23.5

easier to detect, compared to their relatively tiny cousins, so-called stellar mass black holes.

1:29.6

Those are closer in mass to our sun.

1:31.7

If you have a stellar mass black hole, it doesn't have the same oomph.

1:36.7

So it's trickier to detect them.

1:39.7

Now, researchers in Europe claim to have stumbled upon an unexpected trove of these stellar mass black holes

1:45.7

in a puffy star cluster called Palomar 5.

1:49.0

In the paper, we call it it the Rosetta Stone.

1:51.6

Mark Helis is an astrophysicist with the University of Barcelona and the Catalan Institute

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