Newsbriefs ----------------------------------------------------------------- Black hole discovered at center of a distant galaxy The Hopkins astronomers who recently discovered a super-massive black hole located in the center of a galaxy about 100 million light-years from Earth, estimate its mass to be equivalent to 1.2 billion suns. And they all are compressed into a space the size of a fingernail. The black hole--discovered by Hopkins graduate student Laura Ferrarese and Professor Holland Ford and astronomer Walter Jaffe, of Leiden University in the Netherlands, using the Hubble Space Telescope--is surrounded by a disk of dust and gas spinning at speeds of up to 1 million miles per hour. Their findings were announced last week at the European Space Agency in Paris. It is the third confirmed black hole. Only a year ago, the phenomena were considered hypothetical, but the recent discoveries have ushered in a new field of astronomy research-- "black hole demographics," Ford said. The question is no longer, Do black holes exist? "We are now asking questions like, Does every galaxy have a massive black hole in its center?" Ford said. "'What are the masses of black holes? How did they get there?'" ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- APL-built experiment taking ride aboard Galileo NASA's Galileo spacecraft--which entered orbit around Jupiter on Dec. 7 after a six-year, 2.3 billion mile journey-- carries an energetic particles detector developed by the Applied Physics Laboratory and Germany's Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy. The detector--one of 10 scientific instruments aboard Galileo--is designed to measure the composition, distribution and energy spectra of high-energy charged particles trapped in Jupiter's powerful magnetic field. "In combination with other ... instruments, we expect to answer fundamental questions ... not just about Jupiter's magnetospheric dynamics, but also about the magnetic environments at Earth, at the other planets in our solar system and throughout the cosmos," said principal investigator Donald J. Williams, director of the APL Research Center. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Low protein diet before dialysis may be beneficial Researchers at the School of Medicine have found that a low-protein diet before dialysis may prolong the lives of kidney failure patients during the first two years of dialysis. The findings, reported in the current issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, also suggest the diet may postpone the start of dialysis for some patients. The 44 patients in the study ate no meat, fish, poultry, eggs, milk or cheese and took tablets of amino acids or synthetic substitutes to make up for the lack of essential components normally provided by protein. Researchers cannot explain why the restrictive diet helps, but they do say it appears to prepare patients for the rigors of dialysis. "The study suggests that changes in pre-dialysis care could reduce the number of deaths on dialysis substantially," said lead author Josef Coresh, an assistant professor of epidemiology.