Recently, astronomers asked aloud which plural term would best suit the most enigmatic entity in the cosmos. The responses were plentiful.
In April, during the fetchingly (or chillingly) titled Black Hole Week, a group of astronomers initiated what amounted to a kind of cosmic Rorschach test.
The astronomers work on planning for the European Space Agency’s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA, a gravitational-wave detector that, once in orbit, could harvest the signals of black-hole collisions and any other events or objects that rumple space-time, going all the way back to the Big Bang.
What, they wondered aloud on Facebook, should we should call a bunch of black holes?
Jocelyn Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, an astronomer Vanderbilt University and chair of the NASA LISA Study Team, which provides the American space agency with information about the mission, described herself as giggling “like a loon” at some of the names that came up: “hive,” “asterisk,” “kitchen sink” and “sock drawer.”
After I reported on this quest a month ago, nearly 1,000 readers weighed in on the comment section to offer names ranging from the silly to the profound.
Now, members of the LISA Study Team, after a grueling smackdown of several hundred possibilities, have compiled a list of their own 10 favorites (in no particular order): cacophony, graveyard, horde, perforation, swarm, colloquium, disaster, sieve, brood and doom.
“There were strong feelings about the results,” said Dr. Holley-Bockelmann, who lamented that a few of her own favorites — convergence, choir and void — hadn’t made the cut.
It all means nothing and everything.
Anybody who has ever been tormented in a schoolyard or a locker room knows that names, and nicknames, matter. I have never outgrown or outrun “Dennis the Menace,” and in college the similarity of my last name to the word “ovary” provoked much mirth around the fraternity house. Part of Donald Trump’s success on the campaign trail owed to his inimitable way of branding his opponents: Crooked Hilary, Lyin’ Ted, Low-Energy Jeb.
Names matter in science, too. Twenty years ago the astronomical community tore itself apart over the definition of the word “planet,” at least as it refers to bodies in our solar system. In the end, by an argument few understand, Pluto was demoted to the status of a dwarf planet.
But the name “black hole” is one of the great branding successes of modern science. Black holes are objects or realms in space-time where gravity is so great that not even light can escape. Their existence was effectively predicted in 1916, when the German physicist and astronomer Karl Schwarzschild solved Albert Einstein’s equations of the general theory of relativity for a single point mass, a star.
In the 1960s and ’70s, when such objects were first being found, some Russian theorists called them “frozen stars,” because of a quirk in relativity that makes time appear to slow down in a gravitational field. A star’s collapse — the prototypical origin of such a phenomenon — would appear to stop in time altogether at the edge of a black hole. It would never age, nor would we ever see it go over the edge of the “hole” into complete collapse from our point of view.
But if the star could see, it would observe itself falling freely past the edge and being crushed out of existence at the black hole’s center, where, according to Einstein’s equations, space, time and the laws of physics would cease to exist. This dire possibility — of physics predicting the end of physics — deserved attention, according to the late John Archibald Wheeler, a theoretical physicist at Princeton and the University of Texas at Austin.
Wheeler did not invent the name “black hole,” but it was he who seized on it after an audience member reportedly tossed it out during a talk Wheeler was giving on what he considered the greatest crisis in the history of physics. “Calling these things black holes was a master stroke,” Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge University astrophysicist, once told me. “They’re named black holes because they related to human fears of being destroyed or gobbled up.”
Hawking perhaps did the most to dispel that aura of doom and death when he discovered in 1974 that, at the far end of time, black holes would eventually release back into the cosmos all the energy and matter they had imprisoned.
But we are not yet at that phase of cosmic history. For the time being, black holes are dark, ravenous stars, strewing table scraps across space and lighting it up with their passive hunger. A black hole won’t chase you down like a shark; it sits with its mouth open, like an eel in a coral reef, waiting for you to swim past.
A group of sharks is a shiver; eels are a swarm. Black holes? Many of the suggestions from Times readers drew on the grim aspect.
“Abyss,” “crush,” “haunting” and “chasm” came up frequently. So did (less grimly) “Hawking,” after the man who did so much to understand them, as well as “riddle,” “mystery,” “mass” and “binge.” Other favorites: a “scream” of black holes, an “oblivion” and a “mosh pit.”
Some readers, playing on the idea of a multiplicity of holes, proposed a “colander,” a “doily,” a “lace” and a “warren.” One, responding to Dr. Holley-Bockelmann’s giggle, nominated “loon.”
Another proposed Argus Panoptes, a primordial giant in Greek mythology, whose body was covered with eyes. A third reached into Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” series to suggest a “thinny,” a weak spot in reality where the fabric between worlds has grown thin.
Inevitably, politics was on the minds of many. A suggestion to call a group of black holes a “Trump” was recommended by 125 other readers. “Congress” received multiple votes. (Presumably cooler heads will prevail among astronomers, who depend on federal funds to build their telescopes and conduct research.)
For what it’s worth, there is nothing official going on here. Nor will there be any prize for coming up with the winning name.
Raisa Stebbins, the 32-year-old daughter of one of the LISA scientists, Tuck Stebbins, raised the etymological issue initially, Dr. Holley-Bockelmann said. “It was Raisa’s question that turned our Very Serious Meeting About LISA into a fun distraction,” she said. Hundreds of ideas poured in from friends and the internet.
In all, two dozen astronomers took part in the process, Dr. Holley-Bockelmann said. After much spirited discussion brought the list down to 16 strong contenders, the astronomers voted on them using a proportional ranked-choice voting algorithm, RankIt.
“There were only 26 voters,” Dr. Holley-Bockelmann said, “so then we had a discussion about small-number statistics and what happens in the algorithm when there are tie votes.”
The International Astronomical Union, the author of Pluto’s notorious demotion, controls naming rights for individual things in the sky, with far-reaching fussiness. For instance, the rules demand that straits connecting the seas of Titan be named for characters in Isaac Asimov’s classic “Foundation” series of science-fiction novels. But the group has no stance on black-hole conglomerations, said Marion Schmitz, a Caltech astronomer who is chair of the I.A.U. Commission 5 working group on designations.
“We don’t come up with designations unless there is an obvious conflict with existing designations or inappropriate suggestions,” Dr. Schmitz said in an email. Any name that is used in the literature is fine with the working group and the rest of the community, she said.
With that in mind, I propose that the naming process begin by changing the overarching theme from one of doom to one of creation, minding Hawking’s idea that black holes will eventually explode and return their energy to the universe. I would call them a “litter,” as in a litter of kittens.
We don’t know what the future of the universe is in any detail. A litter of black holes, as of the kind that was discovered in the star cluster NGC 6397, brims with possibility and mischief. They could do anything: merge into a giant black hole, or engage in spirited energetic interplay. Like kittens, they pose no threat to us — in their current incarnation, at least — and are a delight to watch at a safe distance.
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May 27, 2021 at 04:00PM
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What to Name a Bunch of Black Holes? You Had Some Ideas. - The New York Times
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