Scientists have revealed why galaxies are dying and it is due to heavy metals strangling. In history, galaxies have been classified into two main categories according to its ability to allow heavenly bodies to form such as stars.
A new study published in the Nature journal sheds new insight on why other galaxies cannot provide a habitable environment for stars to be born. According to it, dying galaxies contain higher amounts of metals than the living ones. When a galaxy's supply of gas runs out, it still has gas left to bring about stars which contain elements that are heavier than helium and hydrogen. However, in galaxies where gas supply is cut-off abruptly, star formation is also suddenly interrupted, leading to meal accumulation.
Through the models that the astronomers have developed for the study, the findings indicated that strangulation actually consumes 4 billion years to manifest star formation interruption.
Strangulation works only for those galaxies that are 100 billion times heavier than the sun, which is 95% of the rest of the galaxies. The theory of strangulation was the conclusive for larger galaxies.
The group of researchers studied approximately 26, 000 nearby galaxies and are still targeting more distant galaxies in the near future. This is in-line with their aim of providing a clear picture of how the universe looked and functioned when it was younger.
Yingjie Peng, the lead author of the study from Cambridge University, noted that additional studies will forward researchers to a better understanding of the galaxies' evolution.
Peng told Space, "We have many forthcoming powerful instruments, such as the Multi-Object Optical and Near-infrared Spectrograph (MOONS), and telescopes such as the space-based James Webb Space Telescope, which will make our research plan feasible in the next few years,"