Science: Those Baffling Black Holes

Astronomers think these invisible non-objects may help explain the universe

"What did it look like?" "Like—like—It had the biggest head you ever saw... A huge great enormous thing, like—like nothing. A huge big—well, like a —I don't know—like an enormous big nothing..." —A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)

In Milne's classic, Piglet was left virtually speechless by his run-in with what he thought was the mysterious Heffalump. Now astronomers can share his bafflement as they grope for words to describe their own strange encounter. Off in the distant heavens, among a grouping of stars that the ancients called Cygnus (the Swan), they seem to have found a celestial version of a Heffalump....

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