Date:
Monday, December 30, 2019
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory has compiled a list of the Top 10 Science Results of 2019 from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a radio telescope array in Chile's Atacama desert. At #2 on the list is the discovery of a 2.25 billion Solar-mass black hole in the galaxy NGC 3258 from measurements of the rotation of a disk of cold gas orbiting around the black hole. This project was a part of the Ph.D. thesis of Benjamin Boizelle, working in Aaron Barth's research group at UCI. Boizelle is now a postdoctoral researcher at Texas A&M University. Here are the original ALMA Observatory press release and the UCI news story on NGC 3258, from August 2019.