Powerful winds capable of destroying entire galaxies could explain why the early universe is littered with \u201cdead\u201d realms when they should be growing and entering their prime, astronomers say.<\/p>\n
As detailed in a new study<\/a> published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the researchers used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe a galaxy dating back to just one billion years after the universe was formed. What they found was a slowly unfolding catastrophe: a huge plume of cold gas being blasted out of the galaxy, depleting it of the star-forming material that once gave it life.<\/p>\n The galaxy, as the authors put it in an essay for The Conversation<\/a>, was \u201cin the throes of death.\u201d And its demise was clearly the handiwork of that fearsome galactic wind.<\/p>\n \u201cIf this rapid blowout continues, the galaxy could be dead in less than 50 million years, explaining the origin of the mysterious massive dead galaxies in the early universe,\u201d lead author Rebecca Davies, an astronomer of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, said in a statement<\/a> about the work.<\/p>\n A \u201cdead\u201d galaxy is one that is no longer giving birth to new stars. It\u2019s expected that an old galaxy will fizzle out over billions of years, but astronomers\u2019 expectations were turned upside down when the James Webb came online in 2022 and observed a whole graveyard of moribund galaxies when the universe was still in its infancy. How these realms could already be \u201cdead\u201d when they barely had time to be alive in the first place was a mystery.<\/p>\n One explanation was that dark energy, the mysterious phenomenon that\u2019s driving the universe\u2019s expansion, was stronger in the early universe than it is today. The results of a landmark Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument survey suggests that dark energy may indeed be weakening<\/a>, but the authors say that powerful winds provide a simpler solution where premature galaxy deaths are concerned.<\/p>\n Until now, the prevailing logic has been that only supermassive black holes could whip up winds powerful enough to lay waste to the largest galaxies. But these latest observations suggest that a more common mechanism could be responsible, too.<\/p>\n