EUC contributes to international team’s important discovery on black holes

An international team of astrophysicists joined by EUC’s Professor Andreas Efstathiou analyzed data from three telescopes to study a sample of distant hyperluminous quasars.

The analysis by the team shows that these objects emit up to 10,000 times as much power as our entire Milky Way galaxy and contain black holes with a mass of up to 10 billion solar masses, while simultaneously producing stars at a prodigious rate of thousands of solar masses per year.

This finding contradicts the leading theory that supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies inhibit the formation of stars.

The team consists of scientists from 16 universities and research centers around the world including the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). The team is led by Prof. Carol Lonsdale of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) based in Virginia United States of America.

The study was recently published in the internationally renowned scientific journal Astrophysical Journal and is available at the following link: http://de.arxiv.org/abs/1509.00342.

More information on the discovery: http://ahpc.euc.ac.cy/index.php/news/12-black-holes-do-not-inhibit-the-massive-formation-of-stars-in-the-universe