Computer simulations have helped put an end to the debate that astronomers have been waging for the past 20 years. It proved that the process of formation of new stars in a number of galaxies is slowed down by supermassive black holes.

The study was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and Phys.org briefly talks about it. A team of astronomers used three state-of-the-art modeling techniques to determine exactly how stars form in galaxies.

The mechanism itself has long been known. However, it is also known that the process of star formation in different galaxies occurs in different ways. Some galaxies are a kind of factories for the production of stars, while their neighbors have this process frozen at a certain stage.

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