NASA Images. Star births seen on cosmic scale in distant galaxy. WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists have found a cosmic supermom. It's a galaxy that gives births to more stars in a day than ours does in a year. Astronomers used NASA's Chandra X-Ray telescope to spot this distant gigantic galaxy creating about 740 new stars a year. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy spawns just about one new star each year. The galaxy is about 5.7 billion light years away in the center of a recently discovered cluster of galaxies that give off the brightest X-ray glow astronomers have seen.
But this is the size, type and age of galaxy that shouldn't be producing stars at such a rapid pace, said the authors of a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. "It's very extreme," said Harvard University astronomer Ryan Foley, co-author of the study. The unnamed galaxy — officially known by a string of letters and numbers — is about 3 trillion times the size of our sun, said study lead author Michael McDonald of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Online: The Detailed Universe: This will Blow Your Mind.
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