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). At that rate, the galaxy needs only 50 million years to grow into an equivalent of 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. Another unusual aspect is the fact that scientists are observing this galaxy at a time when the universe 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 of NASA's Spitzer Science Center. "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 Surveyor, Nick Scoville of Caltech responded: "We may be witnessing, for the first time, the formation of one of the most massive elliptical galaxies in the universe."
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