Super massive black holes

At the centres of galaxies there are black holes with masses between one million and ten billion solar masses.

This formation of these black holes is almost certainly connected to the formation of the galaxies themselves. We are using the Atacama Large Millimetre Array to observe the molecular gas at the centres of samples of nearby galaxies. This allows us to measure the masses of the black holes themselves, and to study the interaction between the black hole and the surrounding galaxy.