Charity Woodrum

Okay, so a galaxy can die or quench in a variety of different ways.

Yeah, we call it death in kind of a way or a dimming of sorts.

Yeah.

Got it.

So I would define it as any process that prevents star formation from happening.

Okay.

And for stars to form, you need cold, dense gas.

You can think of cold, dense gas, mostly hydrogen, as the fuel for star formation.

Well, for example, the supermassive black holes that exist in the center of every massive galaxy, those supermassive black holes can heat up that gas.

Or the supermassive black holes can have these jets that'll actually expel the gas outside of the galaxy completely into the intergalactic space.

Yeah, and that's a term that actually is used in galaxy quenching.

It's called starvation because some of this cold gas can come into the galaxy from what we call the cosmic web.

Okay.

And if that process gets shut off for some reason, then we call that starvation.

So it's like it could get pushed out from the inside or it just stops coming in?

Yeah, exactly.

There's starvation, strangulation.

Yeah, I'm not sure why these words are so violent.

I feel like we could have come up with better ones.

Should I start with all the way back to how I got involved in astronomy in general?