Amazing New X-Ray Image of the Whirlpool Galaxy Shows it is Dotted with Black Holes

In the Milky Way there's a single X-ray binary -- a system consisting of a black hole capturing and heating material from an orbiting companion star -- known as Cygnus X-1. But 30 million light-years away in the Whirlpool galaxy, M51, there are hundreds of X-ray points of light and a full 10 X-ray binaries. […]