An international team of astronomers, including Dr. John Kormendy of the University of Texas at Austin, has discovered eight new supermassive black holes, revealing important new clues to the process of galaxy formation. The discoveries will bring the total number of black holes so far found in the universe to at least 33. Jr. Centennial Chair in Astronomy at UT Austin's Department of Astronomy, Dr. Karl Gebhardt, a Hubble postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Dr. Douglas Richstone, a professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan's Department of Astronomy, and an international team of collaborators. In the early days of the search, from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, all the emphasis was on finding out whether these black holes really exist. Black holes are so compressed that their surface gravity is strong enough to keep even light from escaping.
Some black holes have masses several times the mass of the Earth's Sun.
These are formed when massive stars die. Supermassive black holes, in contrast, are a million to a billion times the mass of the Sun and are found at the centers of galaxies. Because black holes are invisible, scientists can detect and study them only by observing the movements and velocities of the stars swirling around them. The first supermassive black hole was discovered in 1984, although astrophysicists for years had been predicting black holes on the basis of their theories of how the galaxies operate. Supermassive black holes were predicted by our theory of what powers quasars, the brightest objects in the universe.