NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has discovered the oldest galaxy known to suddenly stop star formation: GS-9209, which stopped star formation more than 12.5 billion years ago, scientists say. The discovery is very important because it provides evidence that at least some galaxies died out when the universe was still young. A team of scientists led by astrophysicist Adam Karnal recently published a new study on Arxiv detailing the discovery of the oldest known “extinct galaxy” to date. Using the enormous power of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Kanal and his colleagues confirmed that the galaxy GS-9209 halted its star formation process about 12.5 billion years ago, when the universe was only 10 percent complete. of your current age. A sudden creative collapse.
Until a few years ago, astronomers believed that most galaxies formed from stellar material in an event called a “mass collapse.” He postulates that star formation in galaxies occurs through the collapse of massive clouds of gas and dust, followed by star formation in a short period of time. However, this idea lost ground after it was discovered that the largest galaxies were formed by the slow merger of many smaller galaxies.
Now, in an interview with Science News, Kanal suggests reconsidering the “mass collapse” theory: “What happened was a massive collapse,” he said. And he added: “This is probably the most definitive evidence that this type of galactic evolution is taking place.” He believes it was this collapse that caused the evolution of most of the stars in the galaxy GS-9209, which Webb’s observations have identified as the most distant known “aberration” in time. “galaxy. GS-9209 “shut down” when the universe was only about 1.3 billion years old, but formed stellar matter in a sudden burst of creativity. busy and short lifespan
The researchers found that around 600 million years after the Big Bang, GS-9209 began to form almost all of its stellar material: it began to form more than 200 million years ago, then stopped and fell asleep in the vastness of the universe. As a result, the researchers concluded that the ancient galaxy was formed by a “mass collapse”, while suggesting that some galaxies may have stopped forming stars in the early universe. In a brief cosmic instant, GS-9209 formed about 40 billion solar masses into stars, or roughly the same mass as the Milky Way. Why did you stop? Using the JWST observations, astronomers discovered an additional burst of infrared emission near the Milky Way associated with rapidly rotating masses of energetic hydrogen.
This suggests the presence of an accreting black hole, which could be responsible for the sudden death of young galaxies. The black hole in question appears to have a billion times the mass of the Sun. To reach this mass so soon after the birth of the universe, the Abyssal Black Hole must have gone berserk, devouring other galaxies before destroying GS-9209. This suggests that at least some of the largest and oldest galaxies may have formed suddenly after the collapse of gigantic clouds of gas and dust, forcing us to revise our understanding of the early universe.
