Multiple births on cosmic scale in distant galaxy

Washington, Aug 15: Scientists have found a cosmic supermom. It's a galaxy that gives birth to more stars in a day than ours does in a year.





Astronomers used NASA's Chandra X-Ray telescope to spot the distant galaxy creating about 740 stars a year. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy spawns about one star each year.

The 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.