Illustration of a supermassive black hole
Stuart Thomson/Alamy
Supermassive black holes seem to stop stars forming in their enormous host galaxies – and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may have caught them in the act for the first time.
Many of the most massive galaxies in our cosmic neighbourhood are in a “quiescent” state, where no new stars seem to have been born for a long time. Astronomers have long suspected that the supermassive black holes at the centre of many galaxies might be responsible by somehow disturbing the clouds of gas…