2023-06-20 16:03:44
An artist’s impression of a supermassive black hole and the galaxy it resides in. (NASA/JPL-Caltech) Compilation/Linda Astronomers used the Webb telescope to discover an ancient supermassive black hole at the center of the GS-9209 galaxy, 25 billion light-years away from Earth. Its discovery proves that massive black holes prevent star formation, astronomers say. A supermassive black hole has been discovered at the center of a galaxy called GS-9209, one of the most distant galaxies ever observed and recorded, according to research published in the journal Nature. A University of Edinburgh team used the Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe the galaxy GS-9209 and reveal new details about its composition and history. Study leader Adam Carnall said the most powerful telescope in history has shown how galaxies grew larger and earlier than astronomers expected during the universe’s first billion years. “This work has given us the first real, detailed look at the properties of these early galaxies, charting in detail the history of the formation of the galaxy GS-9209, which was formed just 800 million years after the Big Bang, and which is today There are as many stars as there are in the Milky Way,” he said. The presence of this “massive black hole” at the center of the galaxy GS-9209 was a big surprise, Kanal said, because it provides support for the astronomical theory that supermassive black holes stopped star formation in early galaxies. “It was really unexpected to see evidence of a supermassive black hole,” said Kanal, who would never have been able to see this kind of detail without the Webb telescope. The GS-9209 galaxy was discovered in 2004 by Karina Caputi, who was a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh and is currently a professor of cosmology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. GS-9209 has roughly the same number of stars as the Milky Way, with a total mass equivalent to 40 billion suns, yet it is only one-tenth the size of the Milky Way. This is the first galaxy in the known universe to stop forming stars, the researchers say. Supermassive black holes can prevent star formation as their growth emits a flood of high-energy radiation that heats up and pushes gas out of galaxies. Galaxies require huge clouds of gas and dust to collapse under their own gravity to form new stars. “The black hole is so huge, which means it must have been very active in the past. A lot of gas fell into it, which would emit an extremely bright light like a quasar.” Kanal said that all the energy ejected by the black hole at the center of the galaxy would severely disrupt the entire galaxy, Stop the gas from collapsing into new stars. ◇
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