Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have observed a supermassive black hole in the early universe that is killing its galaxy by starving it to death. Remarkably, this "galactic death by starvation" seems to have proceeded very quickly thanks to the creation of 2 million miles per hour winds of gas.
Galaxies are considered "dead" or "quiescent" when their star formation has been cut off. This can happen when the building blocks of stars, dense clouds of gas and dust, have been exhausted. Scientists have long suspected that galaxies can be "killed" prematurely by their central supermassive black holes "purging" them of gas and dust.
