The Hole Story

Black holes may wield an influence far beyond their gravitational reach

Four years ago, astronomer Karl Gebhardt, then a postdoc at the University of California, Santa Cruz, went for a job interview at Harvard University. Although he didn’t get the faculty position he sought, he may have gotten something better: a clue that led him to uncover what may be one of the most telling relationships between supermassive black holes and the galaxies in which they reside.