Galaxies stop making stars earlier if they host supermassive black holes
A supermassive black hole can mass more than a million times that of our Sun; these astronomical entities seem to lie at the center of all massive galaxies. They've been theorized as the gatekeepers to galaxy growth and star formation for a while now, as they pull in all the cold gases in a galaxy that can be used to make more stars. A new study from a team at the University of California Santa Cruz shows a relationship between the gas cooling rate (or quenching) of galaxies with the size of their black holes. The researchers measured the different wavelengths of light coming from nearby massive galaxies with data from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Massive Galaxy Survey. This allowed the team, led by Ignacio MartÃn-Navarro, to create a historical snapshot of the gas cooling rate of the early Universe. Comparing galaxies and their rate of new star formation, the team found that the quenching in any given galaxy is more efficient, and thus takes place earlier, in galaxies that cont...