The work of two professors at NYU Abu Dhabi, Associate Professor of Physics Ingyin Zaw and Assistant Professor of Physics David Russell, is on black holes and the role these massive yet obscure objects play in the formation of galaxies.
Black holes have such dense masses that not even light can escape their gravitational pull, which means that they are essentially invisible. Zaw’s focus is on supermassive black holes, which are hundreds of thousands to billions of times more massive than the Sun and can be found at the center of “every normal galaxy,” she said.
Research in the field has shown there is a correlation between the mass of a black hole and the mass of the surrounding galaxy, which indicates that black holes and galaxies may co-evolve, Zaw explained. But there are cases where the masses of the two bodies don’t correlate, and these are interesting sites for analysis.
Read more at New York University Abu Dhabi