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Another discovery by the Webb telescope.
Ancient distant galaxy GS-9209 thought to have supermassive black hole in centre
Scientists have worked out the properties of an ancient galaxy 25 million light years away, believing it to have a supermassive black hole at its centre.
The astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope - the most powerful telescope ever built - to look in detail at the galaxy GS-9209, which was born about 600 to 800 million years after the Big Bang, which itself happened some 14 billion years ago.
The researchers determined that no stars had formed in the galaxy for half a billion years leading them to believe the supermassive black hole - which is five times bigger than anticipated in such a galaxy - killed new star formation.
This is because supermassive black holes release huge amounts of high-energy radiation when they grow and this can heat up and push gas out of galaxies.
According to the researchers led by University of Edinburgh experts, the black hole could have caused star formation in GS-9209 to stop, as stars form when clouds of dust and gas particles inside galaxies collapse under their own weight.
Despite the dearth of newly formed stars in what is termed a quiescent galaxy, GS-9209 currently has a similar number of stars to the Milky Way, even though the newly discovered one is 10 times smaller than ours.
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Originally Posted by LWW
