Donald Lynden-Bell CBE FRS was a British theoretical astrophysicist. He was the first to determine that galaxies contain supermassive black holes at their centres, and that such black holes power quasars. Lynden-Bell was President of the Royal Astronomical Society (1985–1987) and received numerous awards for his work, including the inaugural Kavli Prize for Astrophysics. He worked at the University of Cambridge for his entire career, where he was the first director of its Institute of Astronomy.
Lynden-Bell in 2008
A supermassive black hole is the largest type of black hole, with its mass being on the order of hundreds of thousands, or millions to billions, of times the mass of the Sun (M☉). Black holes are a class of astronomical objects that have undergone gravitational collapse, leaving behind spheroidal regions of space from which nothing can escape, including light. Observational evidence indicates that almost every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. For example, the Milky Way galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, corresponding to the radio source Sagittarius A*. Accretion of interstellar gas onto supermassive black holes is the process responsible for powering active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and quasars.
The first direct image of a supermassive black hole, found in the galactic core of Messier 87. This view is somewhat from above, looking down on one of its galactic jets. Rather than an accretion disc, it shows synchrotron radiation in the microwave range (1.3 mm). This light was emitted by electrons captured in the plasma vortex at the base of a jet. Radiation of this wavelength does not reveal the thermal features thought to dominate the emissions of an
An artist's conception of a supermassive black hole surrounded by an accretion disk and emitting a relativistic jet.
Artist's impression of the huge outflow ejected from the quasar SDSS J1106+1939
Artist's illustration of galaxy with jets from a supermassive black hole
