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Astronomers have discovered a rapidly growing black hole in one of the most extreme galaxies known in the very early Universe, according to a new study. The discovery of the galaxy and the black hole at its centre provided new clues on the formation of the very first supermassive black holes, the researchers from the University of Texas, US, and the University of Arizona, US, said. Using observations taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a radio observatory sited in Chile, the team have determined that the galaxy, named COS-87259, containing this new supermassive black hole is very extreme, forming stars at a rate 1000 times that of our own Milky Way and containing over a billion solar masses worth of interstellar dust, the study said. The galaxy shines bright from both this intense burst of star formation and the growing supermassive black hole at its centre, the study said. The new work is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical ...
Astronomers have assembled the largest-ever compilation of high-precision galaxy distances, called Cosmicflows-4.Galaxies, such as the Milky Way, are the building blocks of the universe, each comprised of up to several hundred billion stars. Galaxies beyond our immediate neighborhood are rushing away, faster if they are more distant, which is a consequence of the expansion of the universe that began at the moment of the Big Bang. Measurements of the distances of galaxies, coupled with information about their velocities away from us, determine the scale of the universe and the time that has elapsed since its birth."Since galaxies were identified as separate from the Milky Way a hundred years ago, astronomers have been trying to measure their distances," said Tully. "Now by combining our more accurate and abundant tools, we are able to measure distances of galaxies, and the related expansion rate of the universe and the time since the universe was born with a precision of a few per ...