New method of measuring the mass of supermassive black holes
In a letter to Nature, an international team of astronomers, including Marc Sarzi from the University of Hertfordshire, report the exciting discovery of a new way to measure the mass of supermassive black holes in galaxies. By measuring the speed with which carbon monoxide molecules orbit around such black holes, this new research opens the possibility of making these measurements in many more galaxies than ever before.A black hole is an object so dense that its gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping. Supermassive black holes can be as much as a million to a billion