Survey reveals many thousands of supermassive black holes
An international team of scientists, led by Penn State Distinguished Professor Donald Schneider, has announced its completion of a massive census in which they identified the quasars in one quarter of the sky. "Quasars are hundreds of times more luminous than our entire galaxy, yet they generate this tremendous power in regions similar in scale to that of our much smaller solar system," said Schneider. "The best explanation of this extraordinary phenomenon is that we are witnessing the light energy emitted by material falling into black holes with masses of hundreds of millions of times, or even more than a billion times, that of our Sun." (more)