{"id":9355,"date":"2024-09-16T09:36:08","date_gmt":"2024-09-16T13:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/?p=9355"},"modified":"2024-09-16T09:36:08","modified_gmt":"2024-09-16T13:36:08","slug":"astronomers-detect-black-hole-starving-its-host-galaxy-to-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/?p=9355","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers Detect Black Hole \u2018Starving\u2019 Its Host Galaxy to Death"},"content":{"rendered":"
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 \u2018dead\u2019: it has mostly stopped forming new stars.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018dead\u2019: it has mostly stopped forming new stars.<\/p>\n

\u201cBased on earlier observations, we knew this galaxy was in a quenched state: it\u2019s not forming many stars given its size, and we expect there is a link between the black hole and the end of star formation,\u201d said co-lead author Dr Francesco D\u2019Eugenio from Cambridge\u2019s Kavli Institute for Cosmology. \u201cHowever, until Webb, we haven\u2019t been able to study this galaxy in enough detail to confirm that link, and we haven\u2019t known whether this quenched state is temporary or permanent.\u201d<\/p>\n

This galaxy, officially named GS-10578 but nicknamed \u2018Pablo\u2019s Galaxy\u2019 after the colleague who decided to observe it in detail, is massive for such an early period in the universe: its total mass is about 200 billion times the mass of our Sun, and most of its stars formed between 12.5 and 11.5 billion years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the early universe, most galaxies are forming lots of stars, so it\u2019s interesting to see such a massive dead galaxy at this period in time,\u201d said co-author Professor Roberto Maiolino, also from the Kavli Institute for Cosmology. \u201cIf it had enough time to get to this massive size, whatever process that stopped star formation likely happened relatively quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Using Webb, the researchers detected that this galaxy is expelling large amounts of gas at speeds of about 1,000 kilometres per second, which is fast enough to escape the galaxy\u2019s gravitational pull. These fast-moving winds are being \u2018pushed\u2019 out of the galaxy by the black hole.<\/p>\n

Like other galaxies with accreting black holes, \u2018Pablo\u2019s Galaxy\u2019 has fast outflowing winds of hot gas, but these gas clouds are tenuous and have little mass. Webb detected the presence of a new wind component, which could not be seen with earlier telescopes. This gas is colder, which means it\u2019s denser and \u2013 crucially \u2013 does not emit any light. Webb, with its superior sensitivity, can see these dark gas clouds because they block some of the light from the galaxy behind them.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> are reported in the journal Nature Astronomy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe found the culprit,\u201d said D\u2019Eugenio. \u201cThe black hole is killing this galaxy and keeping it dormant, by cutting off the source of \u2018food\u2019 the galaxy needs to form new stars.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although earlier theoretical models had predicted that black holes had this effect on galaxies, before Webb, it had not been possible to detect this effect directly.<\/p>\n

Earlier models had predicted that the end of star formation has a violent, turbulent effect on galaxies, destroying their shape in the process. But the stars in this disc-shaped galaxy are still moving in an orderly way, suggesting that this is not always the case.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe knew that black holes have a massive impact on galaxies, and perhaps it\u2019s common that they stop star formation, but until Webb, we weren\u2019t able to directly confirm this,\u201d said Maiolino. \u201cIt\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

New observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter-Submillimiter Array (ALMA), targeting the coldest, darkest gas components of the galaxy, will tell us more about if and where any fuel for star formation is still hidden in this galaxy, and what is the effect of the supermassive black hole in the region surrounding the galaxy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":9356,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/earimediaprodweb.azurewebsites.net\/Api\/v1\/Multimedia\/054c8ca7-5960-418c-bf0c-a5cfdf072be6\/Rendition\/low-res\/Content\/Public","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[215],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9355"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9357,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9355\/revisions\/9357"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}