Being probably many thousands of times more
massive than the galactic stars, such a stellar missile would not be
stopped by them, though its direction of flight might be altered. It
would drag the small stars lying close to its course out of their
spheres, but the ultimate tendency of its attraction would be to sweep
them round in its wake, thus producing rather a star-swarm than a
vacancy. Those that were very close to it might be swept away in its
rush and become its satellites, careering away with it in its flight
into outer space; but those that were farther off, and they would, of
course, greatly outnumber the nearer ones, would tend inward from all
sides toward the line of flight, as dust and leaves collect behind a
speeding motor (though the forces operating would be different), and
would fill up the hole, if hole it were. A swarm thus collected should
be rounded in outline and bordered with a relatively barren ring from
which the stars had been ``sucked'' away. In a general sense the M8
cluster answers to this description, but even if we undertook to
account for its existence by a supposition like the above, the black
gaps would remain unexplained, unless one could make a further draft
on the imagination and suggest that the stars had been thrown into a
vast eddy, or system of eddies, whose vortices appear as dark holes.
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