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Radiolab. From WNYC.
The place I really want to start is, I wonder if you can tell me about all the different ways a galaxy can die. Okay.
Okay, so a galaxy can die or quench in a variety of different ways.
Wait, and I'm already going to stop you because that word quench. Yeah. Does that mean like galaxy dimming, galaxy dying?
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.
Okay. And so ways that the galaxy quenches is when the stars can't get that fuel? Yeah, exactly. So, like, what makes that fuel not get there?
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.
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