![This Hubble Ultra Deep Field image reveals a random sample of nearly 10,000 galaxies, including some of the most distant ever found. It was combined from 800 separate exposures with the Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth, in the period Sept. 24, 2003 and Jan. 16, 2004. (Credit: NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith [STScI] and the HUDF Team)](https://physics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/udf_highres2-cc.jpg "This Hubble Ultra Deep Field image reveals a random sample of nearly 10,000 galaxies, including some of the most distant ever found. It was combined from 800 separate exposures with the Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth, in the period Sept. 24, 2003 and Jan. 16, 2004. (Credit: NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith [STScI] and the HUDF Team)")
from Yale News (September 23, 2020), “A new spin on supermassive black holes”
New observational research suggests that supermassive black holes — the mysterious, light-swallowing objects at the heart of nearly all large galaxies — are spinning like crazy.
It’s a finding that has sweeping implications for how black holes form, how they grow, and how the shape of the universe as we know it came into being. The research appears in a new study accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.
“This isn’t the final word on black hole growth, but it’s a big step forward,” said the study’s first author, Tonima Ananna, a former Yale graduate student who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth College. Her doctoral adviser was Meg Urry, Yale’s Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy and senior author of the study.