Gravitational waves "know" how black holes grow

Supermassive black holes: every large galaxy's got one. But how did they grow so big? A paper in today's issue of the journal Science [18 October 2013] pits the front-running ideas about the growth of supermassive black holes against observational data — a limit on the strength of gravitational waves from pairs of black holes, obtained with CSIRO's 64-m Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia.

Added by Helen Sim on 2013-10-18