![]() When asked about Kimura’s idea, IAU naming committee member Jay Pasachoff of Williams College said, “That’s the first I heard of it.”Įric Mamajek, chairman of the IAU working group on star names, called it a “wonderful, thoughtful name.” But Mamajek said his committee may not be the right one to grant the black hole a name. It’s a gift from Hawaiian culture and history, not the other way around.” This is him coming to the table and giving us a gift of this name. “This is coming from a cultural expert and language expert. “This isn’t astronomers naming this,” she said. David Ige proclaimed April 10 as Powehi day, she said. 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. ![]() But this just released radio image (inset) from planet Earths Event Horizon Telescope is the first direct evidence of the Milky Ways central black hole. Stars are observed to orbit a very massive and compact object there known as Sgr A (say 'sadge-ay-star'). 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. Theres a black hole at the center of the Milky Way. “The constellations have their official IAU sanctioned names but in other cultures, they have other names.” “Virtually every object in the sky has more than one designation,” Fienberg said. He said, “that’s just a term that came down through history.” 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. 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. It doesn’t have a committee set up to handle other objects, like black holes, galaxies or nebulas. The International Astronomical Union usually takes care of names, but only for stuff inside our solar system and stars outside it. This image released Wednesday by Event Horizon Telescope shows a black hole. ![]() On Wednesday, scientists revealed 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 black hole in question is about 53 million light years away in the center of a galaxy called Messier 87, or M87 for short. (The asterisk is silent.) A language professor 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 team of astronomers who created the image of the black hole called it M87*. And what happens next could be cosmically confusing. WASHINGTON (AP) - The newly pictured supermassive black hole is a beast with no name, at least not an official one.
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