A black hole is a region of space where the force of gravity is so powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape its pull. It forms when a star dies and collapses in on itself. They have probably been there since shortly after the Big Bang, having formed from giant gas clouds or from the collapse of clusters of immense numbers of stars. The Supermassive Black Hole Research Group, led by Professor David Merritt, is the largest subset of astronomers, postdoctoral fellows and students in Rutgers' department of physics and astronomy. The group is part of a Hubble Space Telescope Key Project to measure the masses of black holes in nearby galaxies.
Black holes are a key to understanding the early evolution of the universe.
Their mass is a measure of the total mass and energy accumulated while the galaxies were being born and provides insights into the processes that operated. Merritt and Assistant Professor Laura Ferrarese have been studying the relationship between SBHs and their surrounding galaxies. They have discovered a correlation between an SBH's mass and the speed at which stars are moving about it. It has been hailed as one of the most important discoveries to come out of the Hubble Space Telescope. Merritt and members of the group have also used Rutgers' new Sun Microsystems Enterprise 10000 supercomputers to conduct large-scale simulations.