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A comment on An intermediate-mass black hole candidate in the Milky Way. Parent comment

Re:An intermediate-mass black hole candidate in the Milky Way by biggc on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @04:09PM (#15178688)
> In the case of direct collapse you have a big cloud of gas that just collapses into a SMBH as the galaxy is forming. In the case of accretion, the SMBH starts off as a collection of stellar mass black holes which then merge into an IMBH, which then accretes gas to become a SMBH.

Could you clarify if SMBH is shorthand for "Stellar Mass Black Hole" or "SuperMassive Black Hole"?

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Re:An intermediate-mass black hole candidate in the Milky Way by antognini on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @04:13PM (#15178718)
Oh, sorry, that is pretty confusing. SMBH stands for "supermassive black hole." BH on its own usually refers to a stellar mass black hole. (Astronomers have lots of weird conventions.)
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Re:An intermediate-mass black hole candidate in the Milky Way by Pxtl on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @06:50PM (#15179746)
Like using scientific notation for 1000 and 100,000?
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Re:An intermediate-mass black hole candidate in the Milky Way by infogulch on Wednesday September 06, 2017 @01:51AM (#15181512)
In those two cases scientific notation may not be very helpful. But consider that astronomers could very easily be comparing them to many other numbers with a huge range of magnitude, and it makes sense to just use it everywhere. Also scientific notation conveys the real precision where just "1000" could mean "1000 +-1” or "1000 +-1000", which by itself can be even more important than any other reason.
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