'Death by a thousand cuts': How a black hole starved Pablo's galaxy
Astronomers found that a giant black hole in Pablo's Galaxy, nearly 12 billion light-years away, quietly shut down star formation by slowly draining the galaxy's gas.
Instead of one big event, it was more like "death by a thousand cuts"—the black hole kept heating and pushing out the gas needed to make new stars.
How the black hole did it
This galaxy is massive—about 200 billion times the mass of our Sun.
It's been blasting out gas at 400km/s, kicking out around 60 solar masses every year.
That's so fast the galaxy could run out of star-making fuel in just tens of millions of years, while most galaxies take billions.
ALMA confirms: No fuel left for stars
ALMA telescope observations showed almost no cold hydrogen left—the key ingredient for making stars.
As researcher Jan Scholtz put it, "You don't need a single cataclysm to stop a galaxy forming stars, just keep the fresh fuel from coming in."
The result: no new stars are born.
Why this matters
Published last November in Nature Astronomy, this discovery helps explain why some early galaxies stopped making stars so soon.
The team now has more JWST time to dig deeper into how these cosmic shutdowns happen.