A 'Crash' Diet: Merger May Have Slimmed Down Monster Black Hole

A surprisingly light supermassive black hole may have shed pounds thanks to a galaxy-merger crash diet, astronomers say. The unusual black hole, one of two found in the midst of a merger between distant galaxies about 1 billion light-years from Earth, has far fewer stars around it than expected, suggesting that powerful gravitational forces have stripped away the excess weight. "One black hole is starved, and has 500 times fewer stars associated with it than the other black hole," study leader J