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dark matter
After a brief but intense period of enormous stellar production, the galaxy GS-9209 mysteriously stopped making new stars
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 ill-fated galaxy, named GS-9209, gave birth to most of its stars during a ‘burst’ of activity that lasted about 200 million years, between 600 million and 800 million years after the Big Bang. After which that activity suddenly ceased.
“It is particularly surprising,” explains Carnall, “how quickly, after the Big Bang, this galaxy stopped star formation. In the local universe, most massive galaxies have stopped making new stars in what we believe to be a slow process lasting billions of years. But when you go back to the beginning, there’s not enough time for that slow extinction process to happen, and it was always thought that we wouldn’t find this kind of thing.”
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