Artificial Intelligence Helps Resolve Long-Running Astrophysics Debate on Supermassive Black Holes

An image of Messier 101, the Pinwheel Galaxy, made with the Hubble Space Telescope. The bright blue clumps in the spiral arms are sites of recent star formation. Black holes with masses equivalent to millions of suns do put a brake on the birth of new stars, say astronomers. Using machine learning and three state-of-the-art simulations to back up results from a large sky survey, the researchers resolve a 20-year long debate on the formation of stars. Joanna Piotrowska, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, presented the new work on July 20, 2021, at the virtual National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2021).