Gravitational waves ‘clues’ to black holes

Supermassive black holes: every large galaxy’s got one but how did they grow so big?

Black holes that collide generate gravitational waves. New data about the effect of these waves on surrounding spinning stars called pulsars has challenged existing ideas about the growth of supermassive black holes.

A paper published in Science led by University of Melbourne and CSIRO scientists shows a new limit to the strength of gravitational waves.

Mr Vikram Ravi, a PhD candidate at the School of Physics, University of Melbourne and Dr Ryan Shannon, a Postdoctoral Fellow with CSIRO jointly led the study at the CSIRO Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia.

“For the first time, we’ve used information about gravitational waves as a tool in astrophysics,” said Dr Shannon. “It’s a powerful new tool. These black holes are very hard to observe directly, so this is a new chapter in astronomy.”
http://sciencealert.com.au/news/20132110-24916-2.html