MSU to study supermassive black holes

Town Crier “Briefs from the Region” (2) – 9/29/20

Amy Reines, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics in the College of Letters and Science at Montana State University, wants to better understand how supermassive black holes get their start. Thanks to a three-year NASA Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research grant of $750,000, her research team will have the funding to do so. Reines is the latest MSU researcher, and first woman in Montana, to be the primary scientific investigator on this particular grant. She has already devoted her career to studying massive black holes in dwarf galaxies after she discovered one in graduate school. Black holes absorb light, and therefore the only way to understand them is by studying their interaction with objects that surround them. Reines and her team will use data collected from NASA’s space telescopes and observatories to find black holes in dwarf galaxies and start characterizing them.