The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently helped solve a cosmic “murder,” the untimely demise of Pablo’s Galaxy, more formally known as GS-10578: a disc-shaped galaxy about the size of our Milky Way. Its time of death? Just 2 billion years after the Big Bang.
Light from this distant galaxy had to begin its trip across the cosmos about 2 billion years after the Big Bang in order to reach Earth, giving us a snapshot of the early universe. But the snapshot that reached us is basically a celestial crime scene photo, because in galactic terms, Pablo’s Galaxy is dead, meaning that it’s stopped forming new stars. Using JWST’s instruments, Cambridge University astrophysicist Francesco d’Eugenio and his colleagues caught a supermassive black hole red-handed, slowly starving the galaxy to death.
