Washington: The newly pictured super-massive black hole is a beast with no name, at least not an official one. And what happens next could be cosmically confusing.
The team of astronomers who created the image of the black hole called it ‘M87(asterisk)’. A language professor has given it a name from a Hawaiian chant — Powehi — meaning ‘the adorned fathomless dark creation’. What about the international group in charge of handing out astronomical names? Well, it has never named a black hole.
The black hole in question is about 53 million light years away in the centre of a galaxy called ‘Messier 87’ or ‘M87’ for short. Scientists revealed Wednesday a picture they took of it using eight radio telescopes, the first time humans had actually seen one of the dense celestial objects that suck up everything around them, even light.
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) 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, poor ‘Pluto’ somehow got demoted to a dwarf planet, leading to 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. It’s just a term that came down through history,” he said while talking about the Milky Way. “Virtually every object in the sky has more than one designation. The constellations have their official IAU sanctioned names but in other cultures, they have other names.”
When it comes to the black hole we saw this week, University of Hawaii-Hilo Hawaiian professor, Larry Kimura stepped up even before the photo was unveiled.
Powehi (pronounced poh-veh-hee) is the black hole’s Hawaiian name, not its official name, explained Jessica Dempsey, who helped capture the black hole image as deputy director of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii’s tallest mountain.
When asked about Kimura’s idea, Pasachoff said: “That’s the first I heard of it.” Eric Mamajek, chairman of the IAU working group on star names, however called it a ‘wonderful, thoughtful name’.
The day the photograph of the black hole was unveiled, the IAU asked the public to choose between three names for an object astronomers call ‘2007 OR10’. It’s an icy planetesimal that circles the sun but gets 100 times further from our star than Earth does.
The three proposed names are ‘Gonggong’, a Chinese water god with red hair and a serpent tail; ‘Holle’, a European winter goddess of fertility; and Vili, a Nordic deity and brother of Odin.
