Multiple Births on Cosmic Scale in Distant Galaxy
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 (SHAWN'-drah) X-Ray telescope to spot this distant galaxy creating about 740 new stars a year. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy spawns about one new star each year.
This new galaxy is about 5.7 billion light years away. It is in the center of a recently discovered cluster of galaxies that give the brightest X-ray glow astronomers have seen.
MIT astronomer Michael McDonald says the galaxy is strange in another way. It's about 6 billion years old and this type of galaxy normally doesn't birth stars at that advanced age.
The finding was reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Source: Agence France Presse
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