Green Galaxy Shows Off Star Birthing At 'Its Most Extreme'

Scientists scanning the heavens have come across a rather unique and rare phenomenon - a galaxy six billion light-years away that essentially has the maximum efficiency rate in star creation.

"This galaxy is remarkably efficient," said lead author in the study detailing the findings, Jim Geach from McGill University in Canada. "It's converting its gas supply into new stars at the maximum rate thought possible."

Stars are formed from the dense collapse of gas, and most galaxies tend to have a low gas-to-star conversion rate, with much of the gas floating around creating visually-pleasing spectacles for us. Instead, galaxy SDSSJ1506+54 contains an incredibly small region where gas is being driven, and stars are being created at an extraordinary rate.

Using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the Hubble telescope, and the RAM Plateau de Bure interferometer in the French Alps scientists were able to spot the infrared light bursting forth from SDSSJ1506+54 at an intensity of more than a thousand billion times the energy of our sun. After following the breadcrumbs, the researchers realized that this enormous source of energy was a primordial star breeding ground only a few hundred light-years across.

"While this galaxy is forming stars at a rate hundreds of times faster than our Milky Way galaxy, the sharp vision of Hubble revealed that the majority of the galaxy's starlight is being emitted by a region with a diameter just a few percent that of the Milky Way," Geach said.

Galaxy SDSSJ1506+54 is special because it lies at a very special mathematical limit in star creation. While stars are created from collapsing gas, this process can be interrupted by the radiation and winds from other stars' births, which can scatter a would-be star's collapsing gas cloud. Galaxy SDSSJ1506+54 was found to create the maximum amount of stars for the amount of gas it has.

You can read the full published study in The Astrophysical Journal.