FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – A group of astronomers from the Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Sciences now has $1.4 million to study supermassive black holes and their role in the evolution of galaxies.

Astronomers Daniel Kennefick, Julia Kennefick and Claud Lacy, at the University of Arkansas and Marc Seigar at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock have formed the Arkansas Galaxy Evolution Survey, or AGES. The group recently received a grant of $1.4 million, half awarded by the NASA EPSCoR Office and half coming from their home institutions.

“We will have a dozen or so people, including graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, who will be able to address scientific questions at the frontier of modern astronomy,” said Daniel Kennefick, lead researcher on the grant.

The grant they have been awarded will pay for several graduate students and undergraduate students to participate in this research. It also will bring two postdoctoral researchers to Arkansas to work on the survey.

Astronomers have reason to think that supermassive black holes, with masses ranging from less than 10,000 to more than a billion times the mass of our sun, reside at the heart of nearly all galaxies. These black holes are thought to play an important role in the formation and evolution of galaxies. 

NASA has identified the need to perform a census of black holes throughout the universe as a means of understanding how galaxies and the universe evolve with time. However, until now it has been difficult and time-consuming to estimate the masses of these supermassive black holes in normal galaxies that do not happen to be very close to our own galaxy.

The Arkansas research team will employ new techniques to estimate the masses of the supermassive black holes residing in large numbers of galaxies by exploiting a relation that they discovered between spiral arm structure and the mass of the supermassive black hole in the center of spiral galaxies.  The technique will permit them to make use of the extensive archive of deep images provided by large telescopes, such as NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, in estimating the masses of supermassive black holes in distant galaxies. 

“We now have these great telescopes that have taken beautiful pictures of spiral galaxies,” Daniel Kennefick said.

The team will use spectroscopic techniques to estimate the mass of supermassive black holes in quasars and other “active” galaxies, in which the black hole is surrounded by swirling matter.

“Our research group will be unique because we will be able to look at different types of supermassive black holes – those generating lots of light and those that are ‘quiet,’” or found at the center of spiral galaxies, Daniel Kennefick said.

They also will use infrared and X-ray techniques to look for evidence of binary supermassive black holes in galaxies where the birth of large numbers of hot bright stars indicates a fairly recent galactic merger.  Such a merger seems likely to give birth to a binary supermassive black hole system at the heart of the merged galaxy. These systems could be very strong sources of gravitational waves that might be detectable by the proposed NASA mission to fly a gravitational wave detector in space. The collaborators have discovered four candidate galaxies, which may contain supermassive black hole binaries. 

By estimating the sizes and masses of hundreds, or even thousands, of black holes, the researchers may be able to shed some light on the role of supermassive black holes in the creation and evolution of the universe, as well as shed light on the role of dark matter in galaxies.

“Dark matter could possibly be the link between black holes and galaxy structure,” Daniel Kennefick said. “This work might shed some light on the mystery.”

All of the researchers are members of the Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Sciences. Daniel and Julia Kennefick and Claud Lacy are in the physics department in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. Marc Seigar is in the physics and astronomy department at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock.