Connecting black holes and galaxy death For many years, black
holes have fascinated scientists and the public alike with their
peculiar ability to warp space and time and their almost
sinister tendency to devour everything they encounter. April 19,
2010 Provided by the Royal Astronomical Society, United Kingdom
April 19, 2010 The image is a multi-wavelength view of galaxy
NGC 1275, which is a local equivalent to many of the distant
massive galaxies studied by Asa Bluck and the other members of
the Nottingham/University College London team. It shows the
phenomenal power of supermassive black holes to rearrange the
gas of a galaxy, and represents a window onto a violent past to
the lives of galaxies. Over the history of the universe, at
least one-third of all galaxies went through a phase of
development similar to this one. Photo by A. Fabian
(Cambridge)/STScI/NASA Black holes are thought to reside at the
center of almost every galaxy, with some growing to more than a
billion times the mass of the Sun. A team o