JWST catches galaxy-killing wind in CRISTAL-02 ejecting gas twice as fast as stars form, dead within 50 million years
The James Webb telescope caught a galaxy in the act of killing itself. CRISTAL-02, a pile-up of colliding galaxies in the early universe, blows out gas twice as fast as it forms stars. In under 50 million years it runs dry and goes dead. Published June 10 in MNRAS.
The James Webb Space Telescope has caught a galaxy in the act of destroying itself, and the find may settle one of the longest-running puzzles in modern astrophysics. The object, called CRISTAL-02, sits in the early universe and turns out to be not a single galaxy but several caught in the final stage of a collision. That merger funnels gas toward the centers and ignites star formation at twice the rate seen in comparable galaxies. The same frenzy carries the seeds of destruction. The most massive new stars burn out fast and explode as supernovae, driving powerful winds that now blow gas out of CRISTAL-02 at twice the rate the galaxy can convert it into new stars. If that continues, in less than 50 million years the galaxy loses all the fuel it needs to keep forming stars and becomes what astronomers call dead. For years researchers have struggled to explain why the early universe holds far more enormous dead galaxies than models predict. The new work, published June 10 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, points to a mechanism in which the very process that lets a galaxy grow explosively fast can also be what strips it bare.