The Baby Boom Galaxy is a starburst galaxy located 12.477 billion light years away (co-moving distance is 25.08 billion light years). Discovered by

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...

Spitzer Science Center The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

at the California Institute of Technology, the galaxy is the record holder for the brightest starburst galaxy in the very distant universe, with brightness being a measure of its extreme star-formation rate. The Baby Boom Galaxy has been

nicknamed A nickname is a substitute for the proper name of a familiar person, place or thing. Commonly used to express affection, a form of endearment, and sometimes amusement, it can also be used to express defamation of character. As a concept, it is ...

"the extreme stellar machine" because it is seen producing

star A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma (physics), plasma held together by its gravity. The List of nearest stars and brown dwarfs, nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked ...

s at a rate of up to 4,000 per year (almost 11 stars per day). The Milky Way galaxy in which Earth resides turns out an average of just 10 stars per year.

Discovery

The Baby Boom Galaxy was discovered and characterized in 2008 using a suite of

telescopes A telescope is a device used to observe distant objects by their emission, absorption, or reflection of electromagnetic radiation. Originally meaning only an optical instrument using lenses, curved mirrors, or a combination of both to observe ...

operating at different

wavelength In physics, the wavelength is the spatial period of a periodic wave—the distance over which the wave's shape repeats. It is the distance between consecutive corresponding points of the same phase on the wave, such as two adjacent crests, tro ...

Hubble Space Telescope The Hubble Space Telescope (often referred to as HST or Hubble) is a space telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. It was not the first space telescope, but it is one of the largest and most versa ...

and Japan's

Subaru Telescope is the telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, located at the Mauna Kea Observatory on Hawaii. It is named after the open star cluster known in English as the Pleiades. It had the largest monolithic primary mirror in the wo ...

, atop

Mauna Kea Mauna Kea ( or ; ; abbreviation for ''Mauna a Wākea''); is a dormant volcano on the island of Hawaii. Its peak is above sea level, making it the highest point in the state of Hawaii and second-highest peak of an island on Earth. The peak is ...

Hawaii Hawaii ( ; haw, Hawaii or ) is a state in the Western United States, located in the Pacific Ocean about from the U.S. mainland. It is the only U.S. state outside North America, the only state that is an archipelago, and the only stat ...

, first spotted the galaxy in visible-light

image An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensiona ...

s, where it appeared as an inconspicuous smudge due to its great distance. It wasn't until the

Spitzer Spitzer is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: * Andre Spitzer (1945–1972), Israeli fencing coach and victim of the Munich massacre * Bernard Spitzer (1924–2014), American real estate developer and philanthropist, father of Eli ...

and the

James Clerk Maxwell Telescope The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) is a submillimetre-wavelength radio telescope at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, US. The telescope is near the summit of Mauna Kea at . Its primary mirror is 15 metres (16.4 yards) across: it is the larg ...

, also on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, observed the galaxy at

infrared Infrared (IR), sometimes called infrared light, is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than those of visible light. It is therefore invisible to the human eye. IR is generally understood to encompass wavelengths from around ...

and submillimeter wavelengths, respectively, that the galaxy was formally discovered.

Strange behavior

The Baby Boom Galaxy is so named because it generates over 4,000 stars per year (compared to an average of just 10 per year for the

Milky Way The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes our Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye ...

). At that rate, the galaxy needs only 50 million years to create as many stars as the most massive

galaxy A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, dark matter, bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System. ...

ever observed. The discovery also challenges the accepted model for

galaxy formation The study of galaxy formation and evolution is concerned with the processes that formed a heterogeneous universe from a homogeneous beginning, the formation of the first galaxies, the way galaxies change over time, and the processes that have ge ...

, which has most galaxies slowly bulking up by absorbing pieces of other galaxies, rather than growing internally. Another unusual aspect is the fact that scientists are observing this

at a time when the

universe The universe is all of space and time and their contents, including planets, stars, galaxies, and all other forms of matter and energy. The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological description of the development of the universe. Acc ...

was only a little over 1.4 billion years old, meaning that this galaxy was exhibiting this strange behaviour while the universe was still in its infancy. "This galaxy is undergoing a major baby boom, producing most of its stars all at once," said

Peter Capak Peter Lawrence Capak is currently the Architect of Perception Systems at the Oculus division of Facebook. His current focus is developing machine perception technologies, sensors, displays, and compute architectures for the next generation of a ...

of NASA's

at the California Institute of Technology. "If our human population was produced in a similar boom, then almost all of the people alive today would be the same age." To that, the principal investigator of the

Cosmic Evolution Survey The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) is a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Treasury Project to survey a two square degree equatorial field with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The largest survey ever undertaken by HST, the project incorpora ...

or,

Nick Scoville Nicholas Zabriskie "Nick" Scoville is the Francis L. Moseley Professor of Astronomy at California Institute of Technology, Caltech. Education Scoville earned his B.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. Research Scoville's research interests ...

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

responded: "We may be witnessing, for the first time, the formation of one of the most massive elliptical galaxies in the universe."

Colors

The red color on the galaxy represents the birth of new stars. The color green represents a denoted gas, while the blue shows other galaxies that are less active in producing stars.

References

[Baby Boomer Galaxy Found - Universe Today. (2008, July 10)., http://www.universetoday.com/15492/baby-boomer-galaxy-found/
Ancient Galaxy Fires Out New Stars at Record Pace. (n.d.). Retrieved
{{DEFAULTSORT:Galaxy, Baby Boom Astronomical objects discovered in 2008, 20080908 Starburst galaxies Peculiar galaxies Sextans

Discovery

Strange behavior

Colors

See also

References