July 19, 2012 A new model shows how an elusive type of black
hole can be formed in the gas surrounding their supermassive
counterparts. In research published in the Monthly Notices of
the Royal Astronomical Society, scientists from the American
Museum of Natural History, the City University of New York, the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of
Technology, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
propose that intermediate-mass black holes -- light-swallowing
celestial objects with masses ranging from hundreds to many
thousands of times the mass of the Sun -- can grow in the gas
disks around supermassive black holes in the centers of
galaxies. The physical mechanism parallels the model
astrophysicists use to describe the growth of giant planets in
the gas disks surrounding stars. "We know about small black
holes, which tend to be close to us and have masses a few to 10
times that of our Sun, and we know about supermassive black
holes, which are found in the centers of galaxies and