NASA telescope has recently spotted a previously unknown galaxy at 12.3 billion light years away (it is believed that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, which means we see what happened when the universe was 13 billion years old), which managed to produce 4,000 stars a year, compared to only 10 stars our very own Milky Way galaxy has produced.
This finding challenges the theory that stars are produced over a long period of time by slowly absorbing pieces of galaxies. The new galaxy seems to prove that stars are born by one big boom in massive numbers. At the rate it is currently producing stars, it only needs 50 million years to make a galaxy equivalent to all the major ones we know of today.
The new galaxy, nicknamed “baby boom” is unusually bright and is now considered to be the brightest starburst galaxy in the distant universe. That is because of the great number of new stars that it contains. When a new star is born it shines very brightly (ultraviolet light) and produces a large amount of dust, which then absorbs the light and reflects it (emitting the heat back). Although, Cedric Lacey, an astrophysicist Durham University in U.K cautions against jumping to conclusions. He says that several more galaxies must be observed with better telescopes to come to some sort of new conclusions. We need to determine whether this is a typical behaviour for forming galaxies or the “baby boom” is the exception.