This star cluster is slowly being taken over by black holes. In a billion years they’ll kill it.

A distant cluster of stars orbiting our galaxy has a dark fate awaiting it: It’s slowly being taken over by black holes, and in a billion years, just as it finally dissolves into space, it will be entirely made up of black holes.

This may sound weird, but in fact may happen fairly often to such clusters.

The object in question is called Palomar 5. It’s a globular cluster, which are usually tightly packed collections of hundreds of thousands if not millions of stars in a roughly ball-shaped col...