Galaxies, like people, are shaped by their neighborhoods. In the cosmic countryside a galaxy can form stars for billions of years, but in a crowded group something shuts that down, a process called quenching. A new study caught it happening in a distant group by measuring the fuel: the molecular gas. The group galaxies hold only about a third of the gas of their isolated cousins, and the gas stripped out between them is mostly warm and sterile. We explain the finding and what’s solid versus uncertain.
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 used the IRAM NOEMA array and 30-meter telescope to measure the molecular gas, the fuel for star formation, in 17 galaxies of the dense group COSMOS-Gr30 at redshift 0.7. On average they hold only about a third of the fuel of isolated field galaxies, and the vast gas cloud between them is mostly not in a cold, star-forming phase, catching environmental quenching in the act. The uncertainties are large and the study covers a single group.){kind=link}