Overview
- A Nature Astronomy study reports GS-10578, a roughly 2×10^11-solar-mass galaxy observed about three billion years after the Big Bang, had already shut down star formation.
- ALMA’s nearly seven-hour integration yielded no carbon monoxide, signaling an extreme lack of the cold molecular gas required to fuel new stars.
- JWST spectroscopy detected neutral-gas outflows near 400 km/s removing about 60 solar masses of gas per year, implying fuel depletion in roughly 16–220 million years.
- Imaging shows a calm, rotating disk morphology, which the team says argues against a recent major merger as the trigger for quenching.
- The researchers have secured 6.5 hours of JWST MIRI time to target warmer gas and assess whether slow starvation is a common fate for early massive galaxies.