Michael Reefe

Telescope images revealed a region in a distant galaxy where billions of stars had disappeared. The void was caused by a pair of supermassive black holes whose combined mass is an absolute record. The discovery helps understand the growth of giant galaxies.

New data from the JWST telescope on galaxy NGC 4696 in the Centaurus cluster have for the first time traced the kinematic connection between large-scale filaments and a compact circumnuclear disk with a radius of about 120 parsecs. The S-shaped structure, familiar from Hubble images, turned out to b