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Researchers have recalculated the mass of a gigantic black hole at the core of the M87 galaxy, and found that it’s about two times as massive as previously estimated: The new study says that M87’s black hole weighs the same as 6.4 billion suns. Researchers say the findings may indicate that many black holes have been underestimated, and also say that the results from this “local” galaxy only 50 million light-years away may solve a mystery regarding the extremely distant black holes known as quasars.

Astronomers had previously estimated M87’s total mass, calculating how much of that mass came from both the galaxy’s stars and its central black hole. But previous models didn’t have the supercomputing power to estimate the mass contributed by the galaxy’s “dark halo.” The dark halo is a spherical region surrounding the galaxy that extends beyond its main visible structure. It contains “dark matter”, an as yet unidentified material that cannot be directly detected by telescopes but which astronomers know is there from its gravitational interaction with everything else that can be seen [BBC News].

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When the universe was young, at least one stellar factory was churning out 1,000 sun-like stars every year, according to a new study. Using an array of telescopes in the French Alps, researchers carefully scrutinised a distant galaxy whose light has taken so long to reach Earth that it appears as it was just 870 million years after the big bang [New Scientist].

The Milky Way currently forms about one sun per year, says study coauthor Chris Carilli, indicating that massive galaxies may have formed very quickly in the universe’s early days.The immense scale of the stellar factory is probably due to the fact that there was a lot more gas around in the early universe, Carilli says. Matter in the universe was indeed much denser soon after the big bang, since space itself has expanded over time [New Scientist].

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In a galaxy far, far away—11.1 billion light-years away, to be exact—researchers have discovered the telltale signature of water. The water molecules seem to be located in the galaxy’s center, where a supermassive black hole called a quasar is spewing out tons of radiation as material falls into it. The water molecules lie in clouds of dust and gas that feed the black hole, and appear to be amplifying radio waves at a specific frequency, forming what’s called a maser, or the radio equivalent of a laser [Wired News].

The quasar, called MG J0414+0534, is so far away that the light researchers are observing originated when the universe was only 2.5 billion years old. “We now know water is out there,” says Violette Impellizzeri from the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany. “Because water masers arise close to the cores of galaxies, our result opens new interesting possibilities for studying supermassive black holes [at the galactic cores] at a time when galaxies were forming” [New Scientist].

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