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

Will this radiation sweep over the rim

[CRCulver]

"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.

This reminds me of Larry Niven's short story "At the Core" (collected in Crashlander ) where an expedition to the galactic core finds that the density of stars in the area causes a chain of supernovas, whose radiation will eventually sweep over the outskirts of the galaxy and destroy life on Earth. Now that galactic cores are somewhat better understood, what's the current idea of how our neighbourhood could be affected by events in the center?

Good Slashdot post

[mbone]

For once, the Slashdot post is better than the original article.

The cessation of star-making is not the same as the cessation of life. It might be good for life. It might be bad. All we really know right now is that this has not happened to the Milky Way galaxy, so we have a sample of one where it did not occur.

The other thing missing in the original article is that galaxies are active things, and can and frequently do "eat" other galaxies - which brings new gas into the galaxy, and thus could restart star making (or make the black hole active again, or both).

Here is an astrophysics prediction : this galaxies will have a high Mass to Light ratio, since gas and dust will be expelled, but not dark matter.