With the upgraded GRAVITY-instrument at the Very Large Telescope Interferometer of the European Southern Observatory, a team of astronomers led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics has determined the mass of a black hole in a galaxy only 2 billion years after the Big Bang. With 300 million solar masses, the black hole is actually under-massive compared to the mass of its host galaxy. Researchers suspect what is happening here.
A paper on this work is published in the journal Nature.
In the more local universe, astronomers have observed tight relationships between the properties of galaxies and the mass of the supermassive black holes residing at their centers, suggesting that galaxies and black holes co-evolve. A crucial test would be to probe this relationship at early cosmic times, but for these far-away galaxies, traditional direct methods of measuring the black hole mass are either impossible or extremely difficult.
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