Some Galaxies Threatened With Early Death?

[Christopher K.]

As if supermassive black holes weren't scary enough...

Asa Bluck and colleagues have used Hubble and Chandra to search for black holes in other galaxies and have reached a startling conclusion. Supermassive black holes can via their accretion disks produce radiation that rivals the sum total from all other components of the galaxy. The amount of energy released can strongly hinder a galaxy's chance to live a full life.

Galactic gas and dust needs to be cold and dense to collapse into a protoplanetary disk, thereby forming new stars and perhaps planets. But the accretion disks of supermassive black holes are so energetic--across all wavelengths--that the gas molecules are heated and dispersed, rendering new star formation unlikely.

Bluck is a Ph.D. student at the University of Nottingham. The study was an effort between that university and Imperial College London.

More information at:
Astronomy, August 2010, p. 18
http://www.alumni.nottingham.ac.uk/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=1725