Black hole’s name less clear than image
HILO, Hawaii — The supermassive black hole is a beast with no name, at least not an official one. And what happens next could be cosmically confusing.
Astronomers who created the image of the black hole called it M87*. The asterisk is silent.
But Larry Kimura, a language professor at the University of Hawaii-Hilo, has given it a name from a Hawaiian chant — Powehi — meaning “the adorned fathomless dark creation.”
And the international group in charge of handing out astronomical names? It has never named a black hole.
The black hole in question is about 53 million light years away in the center of a galaxy called Messier 87, or M87 for short. On Wednesday, scientists revealed an image they took of it using eight radio telescopes, the first time humans had seen one of the dense celestial objects that suck up everything around them, even light.
The International Astronomical Union usually takes care of names, but only for stuff inside our solar system and stars outside it. It doesn’t have a committee set up to handle other objects, like black holes, galaxies or nebulas.
The last time there was a similar situation, Pluto got demoted to a dwarf planet, leading to a public outcry, said Williams College astronomer Jay Pasachoff, a star-naming committee member.
Technically, our own galaxy — the Milky Way — has never been officially named by the IAU, said Rick Fienberg, an astronomer and press officer for the American Astronomical Society. He said, “that’s just a term that came down through history.”
“Virtually every object in the sky has more than one designation,” he said. “The constellations have their official IAU sanctioned names but in other cultures, they have other names.”