ann1119 — Announcement

Even low-mass galaxies can harbour supermassive black holes

16 September 2011

Using the slitless grism on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 to probe the distant universe, astronomers have found supermassive black holes growing in surprisingly small galaxies. The findings suggest that central black holes formed at an early stage in galaxy evolution. This study is part of the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) and will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Read the full story from the University of California Santa Cruz here.

More Information

This research was presented in a paper to appear in the Astrophysical Journal.

The team is composed of Jonathan Trump, Dale Kocevski, Elizabeth McGrath, David Koo, Sandra Faber, Mark Mozena, and Hassen Yesuf (University of California, Santa Cruz); Benjamin Weiner and Stephanie Juneau (Steward Observatory); Claudia Scarlata (University of Minnesota); Eric Bell (University of Michigan); Elise Laird and Cyprian Rangel (Imperial College of London); Renbin Yan (New York University); Hakim Atek and Harry Teplitz (Spitzer Science Center, Caltech); Mark Dickinson and Jeyhan Kartaltepe (National Optical Astronomical Observatories); Jennifer Donley, Henry Ferguson, Norman Grogin, and Anton Koekemoer (Space Telescope Science Institute); James Dunlop (University of Edinburgh); Steven Finkelstein (Texas A&M University); Nimish Hathi (Carnegie Observatories); Kirpal Nandra (Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics); Jeffrey Newman (University of Pittsburgh); Steven Rodney (Johns Hopkins University); and Amber Straughn (Goddard Space Flight Center).

Links

• Research paper
• UCSC release
• NASA/STScI News Nugget
• CANDELS (Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey) homepage

Contacts

Tim Stephens
University of California, Santa Cruz
Tel: +1-831-459-2495
E-mail: stephens@ucsc.edu

Jonathan Trump
University of California, Santa Cruz
Tel: +1-831-502-7085
E-mail: jtrump@ucolick.org

Sandra Faber
University of California, Santa Cruz
E-mail: faber@ucolick.org

Oli Usher
Hubble/ESA, Garching, Germany
Tel: +49-89-3200-6855
E-mail: ousher@eso.org