Here are a few more astronomy news stories coming from this week's AAS meeting, on top of what I already posted yesterday:
This is pretty amazing: astronomers have determined the mass of the supermassive black hole in the center of the giant elliptical galaxy M87
, and found it to be a crushing
6.6 billion times the mass of the Sun!
This makes it the most massive black hole in the nearby Universe by quite a bit. And the coolest part is that they measured it by observing the speeds of the stars in the center of the galaxy as they orbit the black hole. That's an incredibly delicate observation to make, and it took the giant Gemini telescope to do it, as well as considerable modeling of the galactic structure. M87 is the central galaxy in the Virgo cluster and is 60 million light years away (so we're not ...
