Massive Star Factory Discovered in Early Universe: Galaxy Births Thousands

Stars can form at a rapid pace within our Universe. Now, astronomers have picked out that most prolific star factory that they've seen so far. Yet this distant galaxy is so far away, that it's producing stars at a point when the Universe was only six percent of its current age.

The galaxy, named HFLS3, is located 12.8 billion light-years from Earth. It produces the equivalent of nearly 3,000 Suns per year at a rate that's more than 2,000 times that of our own Milky Way--that's a lot of stars. In order to keep up with this prodigious pace, the galaxy needs star-forming materials; fortunately, it has plenty of those. The galaxy is massive and possesses huge reservoirs of gas and dust--worth more than 100 billion times the mass of our Sun.

Finding this massive galaxy, though, was more difficult than you might expect. In order to accurately determine the star factory's distance and characteristics, researchers used 12 international telescope facilities, including both orbiting and ground-based telescopes. These telescopes weren't all the same, either; some worked in visible-light, while others worked at infrared, millimeter-wave and radio wavelengths.

"This is the most detailed look into the physical properties of such a distance galaxy ever made," said Dominik Riechers of Cornell University in a press release. "Getting detailed information on galaxies like this is vitally important to understanding how galaxies, as well as groups and clusters of galaxies, formed in the early Universe."

Using this detailed analysis, researchers were able to determine that the galaxy has a mass of stars nearly 40 billion times the mass of the Sun. In addition, they noted that the mass of material in the galaxy was all surrounded by enough dark matter to eventually build an entire cluster of galaxies.

In fact, the galaxy itself is proof that very intense bursts of star formation existed only 880 million years after the Big Bang. The findings could allow researchers to better understand the history of the early Universe and how much expansion occurred at that time. In the future, the researchers plan to continue seeking out similar galaxies by using the new techniques they employed to discover this one.

The findings are detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature.

Want to see a picture of this new galaxy? Check it out here.