1 year ago, the world saw a black hole for the first time. Here's how it got a Hawaiian name.

One year ago, scientists captured the unphotographable when the Event Horizon Telescope unveiled a fiery orange ring on a black background that became instantly recognizable. Behold, the first photo of a black hole.

The black hole in that image lurks at the heart of a galaxy known as M87, which is the sort of moniker modern astronomers use to name what they study. The black hole doesn't even get its own name, independent of the galaxy that surrounds it. It's a, let's say, abstruse way to refer to an object containing billions of times the mass of our sun packed together unimaginably densely. A program affiliated with one of the sites involved in the discovery quickly offered an alternative name, Pōwehi, and a new way of thinking about how astronomers could reflect the communities they work within.

Read the entire article here - https://www.space.com/black-hole-image-naming-process.html