NASA announced Wednesday that Taiwanese-American astronomer Ma Chung-pei and her team have discovered a supermassive black hole.
The black hole is in the center of a galaxy located in a relatively empty area of space. According to NASA the black hole weighs up to 17 billion times the mass of the sun. It is only slightly smaller than the heaviest known black hole, which weighs in at 21 billion solar masses. NASA says the find is like discovering a towering skyscraper in one of the universe’s “small towns”.
Ma Chung-pei is a professor of astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley. From a young age, she was interested in the origin of the universe and the future of the human race. She was a 2001 recipient of the Overseas Chinese Physics Association’s Outstanding Young Researcher Award. The 50-year old professor says it has been eight years since she entered the field of black hole research, an area she described as being like a black hole itself.