Don Savage

NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC June 5, 2000

(Phone: 202/358-1727)

Nancy Neal
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
(Phone: 301/286-0039)

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD
(Phone: 410/338-4514)

RELEASE: 00-88

BLACK HOLES SHED LIGHT ON GALAXY FORMATION

Astronomers are concluding that monstrous black holes weren't

simply born big but instead grew on a measured diet of gas and
stars controlled by their host galaxies in the formative years of
the universe. These results, gleaned from a NASA Hubble Space
Telescope census of more than 30 galaxies with its powerful "black
hole hunting" spectrograph, are painting a broad picture of a
galaxy's evolution and its long and intimate relationship with its
giant central black hole.

Though much more analysis remains, an initial look at Hubble

evidence favors the idea that titanic black holes did not precede
a galaxy's birth but instead evolved with the galaxy by trapping
an amazingly exact percentage (0.2 percent) of the mass of the
bulbous hub of stars and gas in a galaxy.

This means that black holes in small galaxies went relatively

undernourished, weighing in at a mere few million solar masses.
Black holes in the centers of giant galaxies, some tipping the
scale at over one billion solar masses, were so engorged with
infalling gas they once blazed as quasars, the brightest objects
in the cosmos.

The bottom line is that the final mass of a black hole is not
primordial; it is determined during the galaxy formation process.
"This supports the original theory of why black holes are
important and how they got their masses. It suggests that the
major events that made a galaxy and the ones that made its black
hole shine as a quasar were the same events," says John Kormendy
of the University of Texas at Austin. "These results are a
catalyst that helps to tie together many lines of investigation."

These results are being reported at the 196th meeting of the

American Astronomical Society in Rochester, NY, by Kormendy, Karl
Gebhardt (Lick Observatory), Douglas Richstone (University of
Michigan) and an international team of collaborators.

Though this secret relationship between a black hole and its

host galaxy has been suspected for the past several years, it is
bolstered by the Hubble discovery of 10 more super massive black
holes in galaxy centers, raising the total to more than 30 black
holes now available for study. "For the first time we can put
strong constraints on the relationship
between galaxy formation and black hole formation and growth,"
says Kormendy.

The results show a close relationship between the black hole

mass and the stars that comprise an elliptical galaxy or the
central bulge stars of a spiral galaxy. But surprisingly, an even
tighter correlation is found. In most cases the black holes not
only bulked up through the accretion of gas in isolated galaxies,
but also through the mergers of galaxies where pairs of black
holes combined.

The results also explain why galaxies with small bulges, like
our Milky Way, have diminutive central black holes of a few
million solar masses, while giant elliptical galaxies house
billion-solar-mass black holes, some still smoldering from their
days as quasars. Disk galaxies without a central bulge of stars
either have no black hole or have only tiny black holes that are
well below Hubble's detection limit.

The findings are based on two types of Hubble observations.

Several teams measured the black holes' masses by recording the
whirling speeds of disks of gas trapped around the black holes,
like water swirling around a drain. Other teams measured the
motions of stars around the galaxies' hubs like a swarm of bees
hovering around a beehive. The more massive the bulge, the greater
the speed of the stars.

"Other observations of the entire stellar mass of the bulge

show a very tight relationship between a black hole's mass and the
depth of the gravitational potential well as measured by the
magnitude of random velocities of stars in the galaxy's hub. This
bolsters the conclusion that the mass correlation is real," says
Gebhardt.

The Space Telescope Science Institute is operated by the

Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for
NASA, under contract with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt, MD. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of
international cooperation between NASA and the European Space
Agency.

- end -

EDITOR'S NOTE: A photo illustration is available on the Internet

at:

http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/latest.html