supermassive black holes
esiegel | July 30, 2012"Black holes, which have no memory, are said to contain the earliest memories of the universe, and the most recent, too, while at the same time obliterating all memory by obliterating all its embodiments. Such paradoxes characterize these strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order." -Robert Coover
Our Milky Way, the swath of light and dark that dominates the darkest skies here on Earth, contains a huge variety of stars: large and small, red and blue, from young to old to ancient.
Image credit: ESO / Serge Brunier, Frederic Tapissier, The World At…
catdynamics | January 10, 2011The AAS is off to a good start:
Reines et al have found a good supermassive black hole candidate in Henize 2-10 - an irregular bulgeless dwarf galaxy about 10 Mpc away.
A dwarf irregular, with a diameter of only about 1 kpc, Henize 2 is in starburst. It contains a number of
massive, very young super star clusters.
SMBH are seen in almost every galaxy and, in the local universe, are correlated with the galactic bulge mass.
One of the open issues is which came first, the black hole or the galaxy.
Henize is bulgeless, and if it genuinely has a real SMBH, that would strongly hint that the black…