Ultra Star Factory From The Dawn Of The Universe
Get anything done yesterday? Because a galaxy at the edge of the known universe pumped out ten entire stars. Yes, stars, the great big sky-dominating fusion reactors – and yes, that does make clearing a GTA IV level look a little inconsequential.
The galaxy, so new that it doesn't even have a name, was recently put under close scrutiny by NASA and the California Institute of technology. The results were along the lines of "Wow, look at that thing go!" It turned out to be one of the brightest starbursts in the sky - because it's producing as many stars every day as our sedate little Milky Way does in a full Earth year.
It's also one of the furthest away – at 12.3 billion light-years away it's almost as far away as we can actually see without running out of relativistic universe (our "light-cone", the region we can in any way interact with, extends only 13.7 billion light-years from Earth). With the light-speed limitation something that far away is also that long ago – this super-star-spawning-system dates back to the universe's infancy. We could be looking at baby photos of the most massive galaxies in existence.
This combination of "What can happen" and "Real-time history" makes such observations from the edge of reality doubly valuable. The astrophysical community is working to understand what this data means for existing theories on galactic formation. Closer observation of this and other galaxies will shape our understanding of the entire sky.
Posted by Luke McKinney
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