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Astrophysics

Monster black holes

Nature volume 480, pages 187–188 (2011)Cite this article

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A combination of ground-based and spacecraft observations has uncovered two black holes of 10 billion solar masses in the nearby Universe. The finding sheds light on how these cosmic monsters co-evolve with galaxies. See Letter p.215

Giant black holes, with masses of a few billion times that of the Sun, have fascinated scientists, science-fiction writers and the general public alike since they were first proposed1 four decades ago. These supermassive black holes, which lurk in the centre of galaxies, are not just theoretical curiosities. Their existence was convincingly demonstrated 15 years ago, and soon astrophysicists realized that such black holes can have profound effects on how galaxies form2. This realization spurred a flurry of studies aiming to understand the joint evolution of galaxies and black holes. On page 215 of this issue, McConnell et al.3 present the detection of the two most massive black holes ever found. They argue that their finding provides a key missing piece of evidence to our understanding of how galaxies and black holes form.

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Figure 1: Two ways to grow galaxies and their central black holes.

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  1. Michele Cappellari is in the Sub-department of Astrophysics, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3RH, UK.,

    Michele Cappellari

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  1. Michele Cappellari
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Correspondence to Michele Cappellari.

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Cappellari, M. Monster black holes. Nature 480, 187–188 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/480187a

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