James Webb observes, for the first time, how a black hole ‘kills’ its own galaxy

After a brief but intense period of enormous stellar production, the galaxy GS-9209 mysteriously stopped making new stars

Images of the galaxy GS-9209 obtained by the NIRCam instrument of the James Webb Space Telescope Adam Carnal et al./JWST

14/03/2023

Updated at 09:42 a.m.

Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of astrophysicists led by Adam Carnall, from the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, has just detected for the first time how a supermassive black hole ‘kills’ its host galaxy, suddenly turning it off by preventing it from continuing to make new stars.

The …

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