Supermassive Black Holes Can Abort Star Formation

cremeglace writes "Astrophysicists have found that when a supermassive black hole quickly devours gas and dust, it can generate enough radiation to abort all the embryonic stars in the surrounding galaxy. It's not clear what this means for life's ability to take hold in such a bleak environment, but the research shows that the process might have determined the fates of many of the large galaxies in the universe."

Comments

Re:It's not clear? What this means for life?

[MBGMorden]

They are, but life typically forms around second or third gen stars. Before then, most of the matter in a galaxy is hyrdogen with a little helium thrown in. Only after a big round of massive stars + the associated supernovas do you start getting heavy elements in the proceeding star systems.

The upside though is that according to the article, only 33% of the galaxies observed displayed this phenomenon. That's still a massive (the majority) number of galaxies that are just fine. Most importantly including our own. If we EVER achieve interstellar travel that'll be great, but interGALACTIC travel is almost certainly never going to happen (hell, even in Star Trek's far out there perfect future intergalactic travel is not feasible), so it doesn't really matter that much to us aside from scientific knowledge. Our galaxy is one of the good ones. Besides, the majority of galaxies appear to be dwarf galaxies, which would be unaffected by this.