Mar 22, 2022
Supermassive black holes put a brake on stellar births
Posted by Shubham Ghosh Roy in categories: cosmology, robotics/AI
Black holes with masses equivalent to millions of suns do put a brake on the birth of new stars, say astronomers. Using machine learning and three state-of-the-art simulations to back up results from a large sky survey, researchers from the University of Cambridge have resolved a 20-year long debate on the formation of stars.
Star formation in galaxies has long been a focal point of astronomy research. Decades of successful observations and theoretical modeling resulted in our good understanding of how gas collapses to form new stars both in and beyond our own Milky Way. However, thanks to all-sky observing programs like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), astronomers realized that not all galaxies in the local Universe are actively star-forming—there exists an abundant population of “quiescent” objects which form stars at significantly lower rates.
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