Holes on a Roll

Tommaso Dorigo's interest in Black Holes in globular clusters has turned into a lovely series of posts on his blog. The ongoing study into globular clusters finds

... that a black hole's mass is proportional to the mass of the stellar environment it inhabits. Supermassive black holes found by Hubble in the centers of galaxies represent about 0.5 percent of the galaxies' mass. Amazingly, the black holes now found in star clusters, which are 10000 times less massive than a galaxy, also obey this trend.

This finding makes far more sense if the black holes were there from the beginning, as Louise Riofrio often likes to remind us. Note that the term the beginning in this context is categorically (in the mathematical sense) not a beginning in the classical sense, and similarly with the word there, which we use freely with the assurance that our readers will not be tempted to picture quantum gravitational degrees of freedom as big black billiard balls floating in the aether.