The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected a supermassive black hole in the early Universe that was so «hungry» that it began to devour its galaxy.
Typically, galaxies are considered «dead» or «quiescent» when they stop star formation. Scientists have speculated that central supermassive black holes may cause their premature death by «cleansing» galaxies of gas and dust.
JWST recorded just such a moment, which was later studied by Cambridge scientists. We are talking about the galaxy GS-10578, also known as the «Pablo» Galaxy and located 11.5 billion light-years away.
«We knew that this galaxy was in a quiescent state and expected that there was a link between the black hole and the end of the star formation process», says team member Francesco D’Eugenio of the Cavli Institute of Cosmology. «However, before JWST, we were not able to study it in enough detail to confirm this connection, and we did not know whether this state was temporary or permanent».
GS-10578 has a mass about 200 billion times that of the Sun (extremely massive for this period of the early Universe) and gave rise to most of its stars about 11.5-12.5 billion years ago.
Using JWST, the researchers determined that the black hole at the center of GS-10578 is pushing out a huge amount of gas at 2.2 million miles per hour (1,500 times faster than the top speed of a Lockheed Martin F-16 jet fighter) — enough to defeat the gravitational pull of the Pablo Galaxy.
The telescope also found a new component in the galactic wind that has not yet been seen in other active galaxies (this gas formation is colder and denser, so it emits too little light that could be seen by other telescopes).
The team found that the mass of the gas flow from GS-10578 was greater than that needed to form the basis of a new star. This is enough to show that the supermassive black hole in this galaxy is gradually extinguishing it «».
«We’ve found the culprit», D’Eugenio said. «The black hole is killing this galaxy and keeping it dormant, cutting off the source of «the food» the galaxy needs to form new stars».
The JWST observation largely confirmed previous models of galaxy evolution and the role of supermassive black holes in stopping star formation, but it also had some surprises. Theories had predicted that the end of star formation could have a chaotic and turbulent effect on galaxies, destroying their shape — but the stars in GS-10578 moved in an orderly fashion, denying that the end will always be like this.
In the future, the team plans to conduct a study using the Atacama Large Millimeter-wave Radio Telescope to help determine whether cool, dense gas remains in the Pablo Galaxy and to clarify the impact of the supermassive black hole on its immediate environment.
«We knew that black holes have a huge impact on galaxies, and that they may be stopping star formation, but before JWST we couldn’t directly confirm this,» the researchers conclude. «This is further evidence that the James Webb Telescope is a giant leap forward in our ability to study the early Universe and how it evolved».
The team’s research was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Source: Space.com
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