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on Twitter The large black holes that reside at the center of
galaxies can be hungry beasts. As dust and gas are forced into
the vicinity around the black holes, it crowds up and jostles
together, emitting lots of heat and light. But what forces that
gas and dust the last few light years into the maw of these
supermassive black holes? It has been theorized that mergers
between galaxies disturbs the gas and dust in a galaxy, and
forces the matter into the immediate neighborhood of the black
hole. That is, until a recent study of 140 galaxies hosting
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) – another name for active black
holes at the center of galaxies – provided strong evidence that
many of the galaxies containing these AGN show no signs of past
mergers. The study was performed by an international team of
astronomers. Mauricio Cisternas of the Max Planck Institute for
Astronomy and his team used data from 140 galaxies that were
imaged by the XMM-Newton X-ra