James Webb Telescope unravels the mystery of a strange, ‘starving’ galaxy that died a ‘thousand deaths’ in the ancient universe

New observations of a strange galaxy show it was slowly starved to death by its own black hole.

Two telescopes peer deep into space at the galaxy GS-10578, dubbed “Pablo’s Galaxy” after the astronomer who previously studied it. The galaxy is large for its age, with a mass about 200 billion times that of our Sun, and most of its stars have been shining between 11.5 billion and 12.5 billion years ago. (For reference, the age of the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years.)

To the surprise of scientists, they found that supermassive black holes embedded in galaxies were slowly removing the cold gas needed for star growth, rather than tearing them apart (as models predicted).

you may like

“Pablo’s galaxy appears to have ‘lived fast and died young,'” the researchers said in a statement from the University of Cambridge about the new study, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. “Despite its relatively young age, new star formation has stopped due to the almost complete lack of cold gas necessary for star formation.”

The researchers explained that the death occurred “by a thousand cuts” as the black hole heated the gas moving through the galaxy. This meant that cold gas could no longer be resupplied into galaxies, making it harder for stars to form.

“Essentially no cold gas remained, indicating slow starvation rather than one dramatic death blow,” lead author Jan Scholz, of the Cavendish Institute and the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, said in a statement.

The results were obtained by analyzing data from both the James Webb Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). ALMA revealed that there is no trace of carbon monoxide, a trace of the cold hydrogen gas that forms stars, in the galaxy. Meanwhile, JWST showed a supermassive black hole spewing neutral gas at 400 kilometers per second (almost 900 miles per hour). At these rates, galaxies will run out of stellar fuel within just 16 million to 220 million years, a fraction of the billions of years it typically takes for stars to die.

Pablo’s galaxy appears to be representative of galaxies in a young universe that appears to be aging faster than expected. “Before Webb, this was unheard of,” Scholz said. “Now we know they are more common than we thought, and this starvation effect may be the reason they live early and die young.”