Stellar Birth Control in the Early Universe

Cosmic Contraceptive?? Extremely massive black holes in the centers of galaxies may serve as “cosmic contraceptives” in the early Universe, suppressing the birth of new stars. The blue beam of light in this Hubble Space Telescope image of the nearby galaxy M87 emanates from a black hole which has a mass exceeding a billion times that of the Sun. An international team of astronomers based at Yale and Leiden University in The Netherlands found that “old stars” dominated many large galaxies in the early universe, raising the new question of why these galaxies progressed into “adulthood” so early in the life of the universe.