Why does an open map send generic points to generic point?

341 Views Asked by At

I might miss the forest for the trees but:

The situation is (too) special, I think. Nevertheless I'll describe it: I have an open morphism $X\to Y$ of schemes (morphism is locally of finite type). The schemes are locally Noetherian and $Y$ is irreducible with generic point $\eta$. Why (due to the openness of $f$) do we have $f(\xi)=\eta$ for any generic point of $X$?

The more general question (as I do think we don't need the assertions above): Why does an open continuous map into an irreducible space send generic points of the domain to the generic point of the target space?

Thank you!!

1

There are 1 best solutions below

3
On

Assuming that by "generic point of $X$" you mean "generic point of an irreducible component of $X$", this is true for any locally Noetherian space $X$. First, note that we may assume $X$ is irreducible: let $U$ be a Noetherian open set containing $\xi$, and then restrict $f$ to the complement in $U$ of all of the irreducible components of $U$ except the closure of $\xi$ (this complement is still open since there are only finitely many such components, by Noetherianness).

Now if $X$ is irreducible, every point in $X$ is in the closure of $\{\xi\}$. If $f:X\to Y$ is continuous, that means every point in $f(X)$ is in the closure of $\{f(\xi)\}$. If $f$ is also an open map, this means that the closure of $\{f(\xi)\}$ has nonempty interior. If $Y$ is irreducible, this means the closure of $\{f(\xi)\}$ must be all of $Y$, since every nonempty open set is dense in $Y$. Thus $f(\xi)$ must be the generic point of $Y$.