Ancient distant galaxy GS-9209 suspected to have a supermassive black hole at its center | Science and technology news

Scientists have determined the properties of an ancient galaxy 25 million light-years away and believe it has a supermassive black hole at its center.

The astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope – the most powerful telescope ever built – to study in detail the galaxy GS-9209, which formed about 600 to 800 million years after the Big Bang, which itself happened about 14 billion years ago.

The researchers found that no stars had formed in the galaxy for half a billion years, leading them to believe that the supermassive black hole – which is five times larger than expected in such a galaxy – was preventing new star formation.

This is because as supermassive black holes grow, they release large amounts of high-energy radiation that can heat up and expel gas from galaxies.

According to the researchers, led by experts from the University of Edinburgh, the black hole may have caused star formation to halt in GS-9209, as stars form when clouds of dust and gas particles in galaxies collapse under their own weight.

Despite the lack of newly formed stars in a so-called dormant galaxy, GS-9209 currently has a similar number of stars as the Milky Way, even if the newly discovered star is 10 times smaller than ours.

Continue reading:
SpaceX sends the first Arab woman on a private flight to the International Space Station
NHS tested electric headset for the treatment of depression

According to the research, the total mass of the stars in GS-9209 is about 40 billion times that of the Sun.

Lead researcher Dr. Adam Carnall, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Physics and Astronomy, said: “This work gives us our first truly detailed look at the properties of these early galaxies and chronicles in detail the history of GS-9209, which made it form into.” just 800 million years after the Big Bang, there are as many stars as our own Milky Way.

“The fact that we also see a very massive black hole in this galaxy came as a big surprise and lends great importance to the idea that these black holes halted star formation in early galaxies.”

“The James Webb Space Telescope has already shown that galaxies grew larger and earlier than we ever thought during the first billion years of cosmic history.”

GS-9209 was first discovered in 2004 by Edinburgh PhD student Karina Caputi.