Do Supermassive Black Holes Prematurely end Star Formation in Some Galaxies? by PaulMattSutter
The radio and x-ray emission from each individual galaxy was far too weak to study in isolation. So instead, the astronomers combined the observations from many galaxies, building up a sense of how the “average” galaxy in each group behaved. They found that in the dead galaxies, the amount of radio and x-ray emission was too much to be accounted for by stars alone.
The COSMOS survey region surrounded by images of galaxies used in this study. In these galaxies star formation ceased around 10 billion years ago. To the astronomers, this suggested that supermassive black holes were active in the dead galaxies. When the black holes become too active, they spew tremendous amounts of energy into their host galaxies. This makes the gas in the galaxies too hot,. In some cases, the black holes can blow so much material out of the galaxies altogether that star formation completely stops.
This research suggests that something abrupt happened to galaxies in the early universe. Galaxies back then suddenly found their central black holes blasting away, killing star formation in entire populations of galaxies, well before the present epoch. Future research will be needed to understand exactly what happened.
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