“It’s forming stars at the maximal rate allowed. That is “about 1000 times higher than the star-formation rate of the Milky Way”, says team member Chris Carilli, chief scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, New Mexico. Based on the galaxy’s brightness at far-infrared wavelengths, this starburst region is thought to produce an astounding 1000 Sun-like stars every year. The ionised carbon spanned a region at the heart of the galaxy about 5000 light years across. To find out, researchers led by Fabian Walter of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, carefully scrutinised a distant galaxy whose light has taken so long to reach Earth that it appears as it was just 870 million years after the big bang. But it has not been clear how large the stellar nurseries were in the early universe. Regions of intense star formation, called starbursts, span a few light years at most in the Milky Way, and less than a few hundred light years in nearby, bright galaxies such as Arp 220 (pictured). The work bolsters the case that massive galaxies formed very quickly – in spectacular bursts of star formation – soon after the big bang. The Plateau de Bure Interferometer, an array of telescopes in the French Alps, was used to measure the size of a starburst region in an early galaxyĪ stellar factory millions of times larger than anything comparable in the Milky Way has been identified in a galaxy in the very early universe. (Image: NASA/ESA/C Wilson/McMaster University) But a much larger starburst region has been found in a galaxy in the early universe The heart of the nearby galaxy Arp 220, shown in this Hubble image, is bursting with star birth.
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