📄 Showing the "Simple" version — "Advanced" is not ready yet. Add it to favorites to help prioritize it. Ask for the full read

A vast city lights new streetlamps every night. But then a hurricane sweeps in, rips all the fuel from the warehouses, and the lamps go out one by one. Something similar has been spotted by astronomers in a galaxy whose light has traveled 12.5 billion years to reach us. It is a massive system where stars were forming at a furious rate, and at the same time triggering the very mechanism of their own destruction.

At the heart of the story is a galactic wind. Not an ordinary breeze, but a torrent of hot and cold gas rushing outward at hundreds of kilometers per second. It is powered by supernova explosions — the final flashes of the most massive stars. For the first time, scientists have caught such a wind in action in a galaxy at redshift 5.3 (meaning we see it just 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang). Previously, there were only indirect hints; now we have direct observation: a powerful outflow is carrying away cold molecular gas — the very raw material for future stars.

What stirred up such a storm? Most likely a collision. The galaxy is merging with a neighbor, such cataclysms compress gas, triggering a starburst and, consequently, a barrage of supernovae. Interestingly, the power of this ancient wind is nearly the same as that of similar 'superwinds' in nearby galaxies where stars are still forming vigorously today. This means that the mechanism itself, converting the energy of explosions into gas motion, worked just as efficiently 12 billion years ago as it does now.

This scenario explains a long-standing puzzle: why do massive galaxies with almost no star formation already exist in the early universe? It is as if something switched them off. Now it is clear: their own wind did it. And this is not a fluke, but likely a general rule for galaxies undergoing mergers. The galaxy-'city' itself unleashes the hurricane that extinguishes its lights.