Research report 2009 - Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics
Black Holes in bulges and pseudo-bulges
Authors
Thomas, Jens; Nowak, Nina
Departments
Optische und Interpretative Astronomie (Prof. Dr. Ralf Bender)
MPI für extraterrestrische Physik, Garching
Summary
The formation and evolution of supermassive black holes is an important area of research at the
Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE). A lot of progress was made in the last couple of years using instruments with increasing spatial resolution. The integral-field spectrograph SINFONI built at MPE and now at the Very Large Telescope in Chile is presently the best instrument available to find hidden, inactive black holes in the centres of galaxies. It allows to observe hitherto unstudied galaxy types, yielding important conclusions on the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies.