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The young galaxy GS-10578 as seen by the JWST which was starved to death by its supermassive black hole. | Credit: JADES collaboration<\/p>\n
Astronomers have discovered that a young galaxy was gradually starved by its central supermassive black hole, in what was effectively a cosmic “death by a thousand cuts.”<\/p>\n
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST<\/a>) and the Atacama Large Millimeter\/submillimeter Array (ALMA<\/a>) studied this unfortunate galaxy, known as GS-10578 or by the slightly snappier nickname “Pablo’s Galaxy” in honor of the first astronomer to study it in detail. The light from Pablo’s Galaxy has taken around 11 billion years to reach us, meaning the JWST and ALMA allow astronomers to see it as it was just 3 billion years after the Big Bang.<\/a> For such an early galaxy, it is exceptionally massive, containing as much mass as around 200 billion suns.<\/p>\n The majority of the stars in Pablo’s Galaxy seem to have formed between 12.5 billion and 11.5 billion years ago. However, this galaxy seems to have stopped forming stars and has exhausted its supply of star-forming cold gas despite its relatively young age. As astronomers define the cessation of star formation and the transition into quiescence as the “death” of a galaxy, that means Pablo’s Galaxy “lived fast and died young.”<\/p>\n The team behind this study first released results concerning Pablo’s Galaxy back in Sept. 2024<\/a>, using the JWST alone, finding that the supermassive black hole<\/a> at its heart is pushing away huge amounts of gas at speeds as great as 2.2 million miles per hour (3.5 million km\/h). That’s fast enough to allow this star-forming matter to escape the gravitational influence of Pablo’s Galaxy entirely.<\/p>\n Adding ALMA, an array of 66 radio telescopes located in the Atacama Desert region of northern Chile, the researchers observed Pablo’s Galaxy for a further seven hours searching for carbon monoxide, which they could use as a way to trace cold hydrogen gas, the stuff that forms stars. However, this search turned up empty-handed.<\/p>\n But this in itself was telling.<\/p>\n