Astronomers have used the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope to confirm that supermassive black holes can starve their host galaxies of the fuel they need to form new stars.
The international team, co-led by the University of Cambridge, used Webb to observe a galaxy roughly the size of the Milky Way in the early universe, about two billion years after the Big Bang. Like most large galaxies, it has a supermassive black hole at its centre. However, this galaxy is essentially 'dead': it has mostly stopped forming new stars.
"In the early universe, most galaxies are forming lots of stars, so it's interesting to see such a massive dead galaxy at this period in time," said co-author Professor Roberto Maiolino, also from the Kavli Institute for Cosmology."If it had enough time to get to this massive size, whatever process that stopped star formation likely happened relatively quickly."
The mass of gas being ejected from the galaxy is greater than what the galaxy would require to keep forming new stars. In essence, the black hole is starving the galaxy to death. The results are reported in the journal"We found the culprit," said D'Eugenio."The black hole is killing this galaxy and keeping it dormant, by cutting off the source of 'food' the galaxy needs to form new stars.
"We knew that black holes have a massive impact on galaxies, and perhaps it's common that they stop star formation, but until Webb, we weren't able to directly confirm this," said Maiolino."It's yet another way that Webb is such a giant leap forward in terms of our ability to study the early universe and how it evolved."
Astrophysics Black Holes Stars Astronomy Cosmology Extrasolar Planets Nebulae
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