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Link Between Supermassive Black Holes And Galaxy Formation

A pair of astronomers from Texas and Germany have used a telescope at The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory together with Hubble Space Telescope and many other telescopes around the world to uncover new evidence that the largest,most massive galaxies in the universe and the supermassive black holes at their hearts grew together over time."They evolved in lockstep,"said The University of Texas at Austin's John Kormendy,who co-authored the research with Ralf Bender of Germany's Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and Ludwig Maximilians University Observatory.The results are puiblished in this week's issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.Astronomers know that galaxies,those vast cities of millions or billions of stars, grow larger through collisions and mergers.Kormendy and Bender's work involves the biggest galaxies in the universe--"elliptical galaxies" that are shaped roughly like footballs and that can be made of as many as a thousand billion stars.Virtually all of these galaxies contain a black hole at their centers, that is,an infinitely dense region that contains the mass of millions or billions of Suns and from which no light can escape