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Silk realized that the energy from this newly formed quasar would create intense temperature changes in the surrounding gas. This would cause the gas around the black hole and its newly formed quasar

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This correlation is the most important thing we've learned about supermassive black hole so far. Astronomers are always looking for correlations. Whenever you find one that's really tight like this on

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If, as it now seems, every single galaxy has a black hole at its heart, this can't be a coincidence. Perhaps black holes are an essential part of what galaxies are and how they work. No one had expect

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Those stars don't feel the black hole. They feel the rest of the stars in the galaxy. They don't know or care that the black hole is there. If you took the black hole away from the galaxy, they would

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When it's feeding, a giant black hole creates a bright burning gas disk around it and then for some reason, it stops feeding, leaving a dark, deadly core lurking menacingly in the center of the galaxy

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By measuring how fast these stars were moving, he could prove if there really was a black hole at the center of an active galaxy. I picked a galaxy nearby which is called NGC 1068, an active galaxy, w

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This ferocious heart of brilliant hot gas is called a quasar. Scientists thought this whirling mass might be caused by a giant black hole sucking up gas and stars, literally feeding on the center of a

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A supermassive black hole is quite simply gravity gone mad. An object of such concentrated matter its gravitational pull is insatiable. Nothing can escape it, not even light itself. Anything that gets

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But we are just one in 125 billion galaxies of different shapes and sizes spinning through space. Yet scientists haven't been able to explain how a single one of these galaxies was created. Galaxy for

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In March 2000, two astronomers made an extraordinary discovery, one that is set to overturn our understanding of how the universe formed. We're never going to see a time like this in astronomy again.

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When the results came down from the telescope he saw something that was completely unexpected. The picture from the active galaxy where he hoped to find a black hole was unreadable. NGC 1068 was just

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In every galaxy scientists looked at, they found evidence for a supermassive black hole. NGC 3115 NGC 3377 NGC 3379 In M31 and M32 In total there is probably 20-30 or so black holes that have been fou

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Four times a year, Ghez focuses the telescope on the stars of the very heart of our Milky Way. She is looking for the telltale high speeds that reveal the presence of a black hole. The center of the M

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It means that Silk and Ree's theory may be right and if it is also right that supermassive black holes helped trigger star formation, then it must mean that all giant black holes and their galaxies ar

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In January 2000, John Dubinski set out to calculate the final fate of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and that of our nearest neighbor, Andromeda. The Andromeda galaxy is actually falling towards the Milky