New Discovery Reveals How Fortunate Our Galaxy Is to Have a Heart in the Form of the Supermassive Black Hole Sagittarius A*.
The James Webb Space Telescope has captured shocking images of a galaxy similar to our own Milky Way, which is being killed by its own central black hole.
This was discovered by a research team from the University of Cambridge (UK). Analyzing James Webb data, they observed this deadly scene in a distant region of the universe, where the light creating the images of objects took over 11 billion years to reach Earth.
The ill-fated galaxy from the early universe is being destroyed by its own furious central black hole – (Image: NASA/ESA/CSA).
The aforementioned ill-fated galaxy – officially named GS-10578, but often referred to as Pablo Galaxy – is immensely large, having reached a size comparable to the Milky Way after more than 2 billion years since the Big Bang event that birthed the universe.
Most of its stars formed between 12.5 and 11.5 billion years ago.
“Based on previous observations, we know that this galaxy, at the time of observation, is in a state of being extinguished: It is not forming many stars relative to its size,” said Dr. Francesco D’Eugenio from the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge.
Thus, they sought the culprit. The supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center became the prime suspect. Unlike the calm Sagittarius A*, the black hole of this ancient galaxy is extremely furious.
James Webb detected fast-moving winds being expelled from the galaxy at speeds of up to 1,000 km/s, fast enough to escape the galaxy’s gravitational pull. It is the central black hole of the galaxy that is causing this.
The mass of gas being ejected from the galaxy exceeds the mass that the galaxy needs to continue forming new stars, effectively starving the galaxy, according to conclusions published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy.
Additionally, previous models have predicted that the end of star formation has a violent impact, causing chaos in galaxies and distorting their shapes in the process.
However, the stars in this disk-shaped galaxy continue to move in an orderly manner, indicating that this is not always the case.
Both phenomena – the black hole’s “killer” behavior and the way the galaxy dies quietly – have never been directly observed before.
“This is another way to show that James Webb represents a significant advancement in our ability to study the early universe and how the universe evolves,” Dr. D’Eugenio stated.
