Astron. Astrophys. 518, L155 (2010)

When a black hole at the centre of a galaxy grows large enough, it sucks the surrounding gas towards it, causing the bulge around the hole to glow brightly. Researchers have suspected that much of the flowing gas grows hot enough to be ejected from the galactic core, depleting the galaxy of fuel and halting star formation.

Chiara Feruglio with the National Centre for Scientific Research and based in Saclay, France, Roberto Maiolino at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome and their colleagues have now used a radio interferometer to observe gas flowing out of a distant galactic centre at the prodigious rate of 700 solar masses per year. As predicted, the flow rate is large enough to one day stop new stars from forming in the galaxy — explaining why such galaxies die out.