Black Holes Only Grow So Big

A few weeks ago there was a fairly cool paper on arXiv that suggested that supermassive black holes may only be able to grow so big. This triggered several Astronomy Cast listeners to write and basically say “Huh?” We addressed this a little bit in today’s questions show (real show to...

Q: Who killed the Star Formation? A: The AGN did it.

One of the neat things about being a professional astronomer is sometimes knowing the authors of neat papers. Submitted to the arXiv on Friday was one such neat paper with an author list full of people I respect from their work and 1 collaborator. So let’s just say this is all neat and move on to the...

When Galaxies interact, it’s Not all Fun and Games

Today’s round of press conference started with the story of three systems that have mutually triggered fireworks in one another’s cores. Specifically, a gravitationally bound system of three quasars has been located at a distance of roughly 10.4 billion light years (z = 2.076)....