Supermassive black holes affect star formation
A team of European astronomers led by Professor Kalliopi Dasyra of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, under the participation of Dr. Thomas Bisbas, University of Cologne modeled several emission lines in the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and the Very Large Telescope (VLT). ) observations to measure gas pressure in jet-affected clouds and surrounding clouds. With this unprecedented measurement, published recently in Natural Astronomy , they found that the bursts significantly changed the internal and external pressures of the molecular cloud in its path. Depending on which of the two pressures changes the most, both cloud compression and star formation triggers and cloud dissipation and star formation delays are possible in the same galaxy. “Our results suggest that supermassive black holes, even though they are located at the center of galaxies, can influence star formation across galaxies” said Professor Dasyra, adding that “studying the impact of