Some black holes might kill entire galaxies

Some black holes might kill entire galaxies
Embryonic stars can be doomed even before they are born
By Charles Q. Choi
Space.com
updated 6:26 p.m. ET, Tues., May 4, 2010

Black holes might kill entire galaxies with blazing energy, dooming embryonic stars before they can get born and condemning the remaining stars to a slow death, scientists have found.

Although nothing can escape from a black hole, before matter falls into one, it swirls around to form a disk that heats up as it packs together, radiating energy.

Supermassive black holes are thought to reside at the center of almost every galaxy, with some growing to billions of times the mass of our sun. To see what impact these monsters might have, researchers relied on data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, looking for galaxies with very high X-ray emissions, a classic signature of black holes devouring gas and dust.

The scientists discovered the accretion disks of super-massive black holes in at least one-third of all the massive galaxies in the universe far outshines the combined output of the hundreds of billions of stars in their host galaxies at some point in their histories. This outpouring of energy is high enough to strip apart every massive galaxy in the cosmos 25 times over, while the X-ray emission from them turns out to dwarf that from every other source in the universe put together.

All this radiation can drive away the gas and dust that serve as the raw ingredients of new stars, permanently shutting down star formation in the surrounding galaxy. The remaining stars age, redden, die and are never replaced.

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Black Holes really blow my mind. Considering their existence was only proven 30 or 40 years ago, and now super black holes that could swallow galaxies can exist, I hope one morning we don't wake up in one.