Dying galaxies could be consumed by their own black holes

The Milky Way is characterized by being a constellation that is not very active in relation to other types of galaxies, because according to some specialized media, it only creates three to four suns a year in its entire spiral body.

Now, there are other types of galaxies that have already ceased their production of stars, so they are gradually dying. These galaxies, called ellipticals, have stars with a ‘standard’ age, that is to say, that the development of new suns stopped at some point and generated a gradual disintegration of it.

The research results give new insights into the interaction between black holes and their galaxies.


Remember that stars have a limited lifespan. Our Sun, for example, will die in approximately 5,000 million years, according to data offered by astronomers from the University of Manchester to the ‘BBC’.

What is a mystery until now for scientists is why they stop producing stars in some galaxies and not in others. However, it has been possible to infer that the cause is the formation of super massive black holes that are consuming all the gas in the center of the galaxy, a fundamental input for the conditions to be viable and stars to be generated.

To understand a little what happens there, you need to know that light travels through a vacuum at a certain speed. That is, a light that comes from a distance of 15 million light years had to travel 15 million years to reach our home, so the fragment that we can see today is the appearance of a star 15 million years ago. of years.

To test this theory, Kei Ito, an astronomer at Sokendai University, Japan, used samples from the world’s most powerful telescopes to scan galaxies from 9,500 to 12 billion light-years away.

What he managed to capture in these instruments were images through X-rays, light waves and infrared optical data of galaxies that have traversed millions of years of space-time, for which the information of galaxies that continue to form stars was averaged with those that they are dying

According to what the theorists explain, the flashes of light in constellations that are disappearing are stronger than in those where suns are still forming, so they infer the presence of an active supermassive black hole in the middle of the galaxy.

“We successfully detected black hole activity within dying galaxies even in the distant Universe by combining intensive observations from large telescopes around the world, including the Subaru Telescope. This observational result is important to understand why they are stopping their star formation,” Ito said in the research.

Although it is inferred that black holes are causing the stoppage of star production in some galaxies of the ‘primitive universe’, the operation of these phenomena is still not known for sure.