"It can be complicated sometimes when you know a source by one name and someone knows it by a different name, and it takes a while to figure out you're talking about the same source," he explained. But other catalogs exist alongside Messier's, and many of their observations overlap, so the same galaxy - and the same black hole - can have multiple names, Fish told Live Science. Messier's catalog, published in 1771, contains 110 objects 87th in the list is the galaxy M87.
Messier and others documented their observations and numbered objects sequentially, and other astronomers started referring to those objects by their catalog numbers, said Vincent Fish, a research scientist at Haystack Observatory at MIT in Boston, and part of the team that imaged the M87 black hole.
Only a numberīefore the formation of the IAU, many objects in space became widely known as numbers in catalogs created by astronomers such as Charles Messier, who lived in France during the late 18th century and early 19th century. "Plenty of theoretical studies have been done of course, but information was limited about specific black holes, and so naming wasn't really an issue," he said. This is partly because they haven't been directly observable until now, according to Hollis.
Why do some celestial objects get evocative, mythic names, while black holes - arguably among the most mysterious and exciting of all cosmic phenomena - typically don't? Official recognitionįor any space object's name to be officially recognized by astronomers around the world, the moniker first has to be approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), astronomer Morgan Hollis, a spokesperson for the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) in the United Kingdom, told Live Science in an email.įounded in 1919, the IAU established naming systems "so that objects can be unambiguously identified and everyone knows exactly which object is being talked about in a given research paper," Hollis said.īut while these conventions exist for stars, planets, asteroids and the like, no such protocols are in place yet for black holes.
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