An international team of researchers gazed back over 12.5 billion years to find bustling galaxies creating stars at a breakneck rate. Today, Earth’s Milky Way galaxy produces the equivalent of perhaps two to three new suns a year. The AzTEC-3 galaxy, observed to be emerging from the Big Bang’s primordial soup, creates about 1,100 suns a year, corresponding to about three suns each day.
Lead author Dominik Riechers says that galaxies with this quick rate of star production have been known to exist in the middle-aged universe, say 3 billion to 6 billion years old, but this production is surprising for galaxies in their cosmic infancy. “We expect this out of later galaxies in a more mature universe, but not from one of the earliest,” he said.
Read the press release from Cornell here