New keys to universe in galaxy-killing find

The ejected mass was also greater than what is required to keep forming new stars, starving the galaxy to death in the process.

An international team co-led by University of Cambridge researchers has found that the galaxy GS-10578, nicknamed Pablo’s galaxy. (File Photo)

A new finding about a galaxy-killer black hole has excited astronomers and astrophysicists. An international team co-led by University of Cambridge researchers has found that the galaxy GS-10578, nicknamed Pablo’s galaxy, has been rendered ‘dead’ by a supermassive black hole at its centre.

By ‘dead’ it’s meant that the black hole has ‘killed’ the galaxy’s star-formation capability by pushing out the gases required to make stars. The researchers, who used the James Webb space telescope, reported their findings in the Nature Astronomy journal this week.

Pablo’s galaxy is 12 billion light-years away. What has baffled scientists is how this supermassive black hole’s action could have taken place when the universe was so young. The universe is 13.8 billion years old now; which means the rendering of Pablo’s galaxy ‘sterile’ by a supermassive black hole took place just about 1.8 billion years after the formation of the universe.

Astronomers are also baffled over this galaxy being so massive at such an early age of the universe—it’s about the size of our Milky Way and 200 billion times the mass of our Sun.

The supermassive black hole was detected on the James Webb telescope expelling huge volumes of gas out of Pablo’s Galaxy at speeds of 1,000 km per second—fast enough to escape the galaxy’s gravitational pull. The ejected mass was also greater than what is required to keep forming new stars, starving the galaxy to death in the process.

The telescope was able to see the dark ejected gas clouds as they blocked the stellar lights from the galaxy behind them. Before this finding, theoretical models were only able to predict that black holes had this effect on galaxies, but the James Webb telescope delivered the finding with higher sensitivity.

The findings are set to take understanding black holes to the next level. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in northern Chile will reveal more about the effect of this supermassive black hole in the region surrounding Pablo’s galaxy.

The findings also better position research on the supermassive black hole in our own Milky Way, called Sagittarius A, which is 4 million times the mass of the Sun and 26,000 light years away from us. We hope such exciting findings will spur more Indian students towards science and astronomy.