Astronomers say they may have solved the decades-old mystery of why some galaxies stop creating stars, causing them to die.
Astronomers believe that black holes with masses millions or even billions of times that of the sun are responsible for putting a halt to star formation in galaxies, something that is often referred to as the"death" of a galaxy.
Researchers have understood for some time how gas clusters collapse to form stars and that"galactic death" occurs when the gas and dust that forms the building blocks of stars is either exhausted or is somehow cut off, thus preventing further star birth. All-sky observing programs, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey , have confirmed that not all galaxies in the local Universe are actively star-forming, revealing an abundant population of"quiescent" objects which form stars at significantly lower rates.
What has remained a mystery is the process that is causing this. As a result, the halting of star formation has become a topic of debate for astronomers and astrophysicists for at least two decades., U.K., suggest that it is the tremendous mass of the central supermassive black holes—which exist at the heart of most galaxies—that put the brakes on star formation.
Joanna Piotrowska-Karpov, an astrophysics Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge, led the research published in theShe said in a statement:"Supermassive black holes—objects with masses equivalent to millions or even billions of Suns— really do have a big effect on their surroundings. These monster objects force their host galaxies into a kind of semi-retirement from star formation.