In a recent study led by the Center for Astrobiology (CAB), CSIC-INTA (Spain), and the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), published in Nature Astronomy, a group of researchers used the NIRSpec instrument onboard JWST to understand how galaxies cease their star formation activity in the early Universe, how they “die” and become quiescent. They were able to build a 3-dimensional map of the environment of a dead galaxy called Jekyll, and found large amounts of gas, the fuel for star formation. But despite this high gas abundance, for enigmatic reasons, Jekyll has remained quiescent for more than half a billion years when the Universe was just 1.5 billion years old.
