Within the Star Wars Extended Universe, there is a science base on a small object within a near impenetrable sphere of Black Holes. These Black Holes remain in roughly the same position and, according to the books, have remained there since discovered. Is this possible?
The place referenced is called the Maw Installation
I'll post the same answer here that I posted on Worldbuilding:
Under the circumstances you describe, my immediate reaction is that it would not be possible. The issue here is that the cluster would be fairly unstable. The black holes would all be mutually attracted to each other, and would soon coalesce into one large black hole - taking the Imperial research center with it.
For this to somehow work, the black holes would have to be in some odd stable orbits around each other. They would have a common barycenter - in this case, the Imperial research center - and would continue circling around it. The tricky part here would be to have them orbit in three dimensions - that is, to not simply have all their orbits in the same plane, but to have orbits at odd angles to each other. Also, there would undoubtedly be gaps between the black holes, which would be undesirable.
The whole setup would seem to be rather unstable, and so I'm inclined to say that this would be impossible.
