A depiction of galaxy GS-10578, or “Pablo’s Galaxy”, which space experts surmise lacked the gases needed to create stars due to an ultramassive black hole. (Image credit: JADES Collaboration)ShareShare by:
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Recent investigations into an odd galaxy demonstrate it was gradually starved due to its own black hole.
Two telescopes gazed afar into the cosmos at the galaxy GS-10578, referred to as “Pablo’s Galaxy,” after the astronomer that initially analyzed it. The galaxy is substantial for its age: approximately 200 billion times the mass of our sun, with a majority of its stars shining between 11.5 billion and 12.5 billion years ago. (For comparison, the cosmos is about 13.8 billion years old.)
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“Pablo’s Galaxy gives the appearance of having ‘lived a rapid life and died prematurely’,” scientists penned regarding the new exploration, distributed in Nature Astronomy on Monday, in a statement from the University of Cambridge. “It ceased generating new stars, despite its comparatively recent age, resulting from a nearly total lack of the cool gas required for stars to originate.”
The investigation team depicted the conclusion as unfolding “by a thousand cuts,” due to the black hole raising the temperature of gas traversing the galaxy. This signified that every source of cool gas was blocked from re-supplying the galaxy, causing it to be increasingly challenging for stars to be born.
“There was basically no source of cool gas remaining. It signifies a steady starvation, as opposed to a sole dramatic fatal attack,” expressed lead writer Jan Scholtz, from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory and the Kavli Institute for Cosmology, in the statement.
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The findings materialized from scrutinizing data from the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). ALMA revealed no vestiges of carbon monoxide, which acts as an indicator of cool, star-birthing hydrogen gas, in the galaxy. JWST, in the meantime, demonstrated the supermassive black hole discharging neutral gas at 400 kilometers per second (nearly 900 mph). At such speeds, the galaxy would have depleted its star fuel in just 16 million to 220 million years, a small amount of the usual billions of years for stars to vanish.
Pablo’s Galaxy seems to be representative of galaxies from the infant cosmos that seem to be maturing more rapidly than projected. “Before Webb, these were unprecedented,” Scholtz expressed. “Presently we understand they’re more commonplace than we previously believed – and this starvation effect may explain why they live a rapid life and vanish prematurely.”
Elizabeth HowellLive Science Contributor
Elizabeth Howell served as a staff reporter at Space.com spanning 2022 and 2024, as well as a consistent contributor to Live Science and Space.com from 2012 to 2022. Elizabeth’s reporting contains various exclusives alongside the White House, engaging on multiple occasions with the International Space Station, witnessing five human spaceflight launches across two continents, parabolic flight, functioning in a spacesuit, and involvement in a simulated mission to Mars. Her most recent manuscript, “Why Am I Taller?” (ECW Press, 2022) is co-authored with astronaut Dave Williams.
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