The 365 Days Of Astronomy, The Daily Podcast Of The International Year Of Astronomy 2009

Supermassive black holes exist at the center of most galaxies, and modern telescopes continue to observe them at surprisingly early times in the Universe’s evolution. It’s difficult to understand how these black holes were able to grow so big so rapidly. But with the discovery of a low-mass supermassive black hole feasting on material at an extreme rate, seen just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, astronomers now have valuable new insights into the mechanisms of rapidly growing black holes in the early Universe. In this podcast, Hyewon Suh and Julia Scharwächter discuss the discovery of LID-568, a black hole that is feeding at 40 times the theoretical limit.   Bios: Rob Sparks is in the Communications, Education and Engagement group at NSF’s NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona.   Hyewon Suh’s research mainly focuses on the multi-wavelength studies of Active Galactic Nuclei and their host galaxies to understand the growth of black holes in the context of galaxy evolution. While the deep, large-area extragalactic su