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Thursday, October 28, 2010

Photo: Tight Arms Linked to Bigger Black Holes in Galaxies


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The Andromeda Galaxy, a neighboring spiral galaxy with relatively tight arms, contains a supermassive black hole at its center estimated to be 180 million times as massive as the sun.

The discovery of a relationship between the mass of a central black hole and the tightness of its host galaxy's arms is offering a way to measure the size of supermassive black holes in very distant spiral galaxies, astronomers announced on June 2, 2008.

Image courtesy T. A. Rector and B. A. Wolpa/NOAO/AURA/NSF