Astronomers have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to confirm that supermassive black holes can rob their host galaxies of the fuel they need to form new stars, driving them to extinction.
According to RCO News Agency, An international group led by the University of Cambridge has used James Webb to observe a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in the early days of the universe, about two billion years after the Big Bang. Like most large galaxies, this galaxy hosts a massive black hole at its center. However, the galaxy is essentially “dead” because it has stopped forming new stars.
According to Phys, one of the senior authors of the study says: Based on previous observations, we knew that this galaxy was in an inactive state. Given its size, not many stars are formed, and we expected a connection between the black hole and the end of star formation.
However, until Webb’s observations, we could not study this galaxy in enough detail to confirm this connection, and we did not know whether the shutdown was temporary or permanent.
This galaxy, called GS-10578, also called the “Pablo Galaxy” after the scientist who decided to observe it closely, has a mass of about 200 billion times the mass of our Sun, and most of its stars are between 12.5 and 11.5 They were formed billions of years ago.
Professor Roberto Maiolino, from the Cavalli Institute for Cosmology, said: “In the early universe, most galaxies were forming a lot of stars, so it is interesting to see such a massive dead galaxy at this time.
Using James Webb, the researchers found that the galaxy is ejecting large amounts of gas at about 1,000 kilometers per second, which is fast enough to escape the galaxy’s gravitational pull. These fast winds are ejected from the galaxy by the black hole.
The Pablo Galaxy has fast winds of hot gas, but these gas clouds are weak and have little mass. Webb detected a new component of the wind that was not visible with previous telescopes. This gas is cooler, which means it is denser, and more importantly, it does not emit any light. With its extraordinary sensitivity, the web can see these dark gas clouds.
The mass of gas ejected from the galaxy is more than what the galaxy needs to continue forming new stars. Basically, the black hole is starving the galaxy.
According to the researchers, the black hole kills the galaxy by cutting off the “food” it needs to form new stars, keeping it dormant.
Although previous theoretical models predicted that black holes would have this effect on galaxies, it was not possible to detect this effect directly before the web.
The results of this study have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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