Located 12.2 billion lightyears away, the Baby Boom Galaxy was discovered by the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology. The Baby Boom galaxy is not only a starburst galaxy, but it is known for being the world record holder for brightest starburst galaxy in the distant universe. Brightness is the measure of its extreme star formation rate. Nicknamed “the extreme stellar machine,” the galaxy produces stars at a measured rate of up to 4,000 stars per year, or one every 2.2 hours. Compared to the Milky Way Galaxy, where the Earth is located, which produces 10 stars per year on average. It was discovered and characterized in 2008 using telescopes operating at multiple different wavelengths. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope …show more content…
Together with Spitzer and James Clerk Maxwell data, these observations allowed the astronomers to calculate a star-forming rate of about 1,000 to 4,000 stars per year. At that rate, the galaxy needs only 50 million years, not very long on cosmic timescales, to grow into a galaxy equivalent to the most massive ones we see today.
The Baby Boom galaxy is named that because its high number of stars generated per year. At that rate, the galaxy needs only 50 million years to create as many stars as the most massive galaxy ever observed. The discovery also challenges the accepted model for galaxy formation, which has most galaxies slowly bulking up by absorbing pieces of other galaxies, rather than growing internally. The fact that scientists are observing this galaxy at a time when the universe is only a bit over 1.4 billion years old is also strange. That means that in its infancy, the galaxy is already exhibiting this odd behavior. "This galaxy is undergoing a major baby boom, producing most of its stars all at once," Peter Capak of NASA 's Spitzer Science Center said. "If our human population was produced in a similar boom, then almost all of the people alive today would be the same