Almost like home: Astronomers find Earth-like planets

According to the Nature study, this primordial galaxy, which the astronomers have named HFLS3, is (was) roughly the same size as our own Milky Way Galaxy, but produces stars 2,000 times as quickly. Astronomers have seen galaxies that produce stars at higher-than-average rates before. They call them “starburst” galaxies. But according to Dominik Riechers, a Cornell University astronomer and lead author of the study, HFLS3 emits infrared radiation equal to 30 trillion suns, and thus exceeds the luminosity of virtually any starburst galaxy that astronomers have discovered thus far. In fact, it nears the upper limit at which a galaxy can release radiation and remain stable. This extreme brightness is why the telescope was able to pick it up at all. HFLS3 was an unlikely find otherwise, given that it is also the most distant starburst galaxy astronomers have ever found and is enshrouded within vast clouds of galactic dust. Only by conducting infrared mapping of the area, and then confirming with ground-based telescopes, were the researchers able to detect the faraway but immensely powerful light. This galaxy is remarkable for yet another reason: It was pumping out stars at this rate more than a billion years earlier than researchers had thought was possible. The conventional wisdom among researchers was that the primordial universe needed a few billion years for its first galaxies to aggregate enough matter and build up enough heat energy of their own before they could begin producing stars. HFLS3, however, was forming stars at astonishing rates at this 880-milion-years-post-big-bang mark and, furthermore, had already been doing so for quite some time. Chemical analyses show that this primoridal galaxy possessed chemical compositions similar to present-day starburst galaxies, meaning that the stars we are seeing in these 13-billion-year-old images were by no means its first. Based on this sighting, astronomers can push the origins for galaxy formation back much earlier, Riechers concludes. Read more: http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/newly-discovered-starburst-galaxy-challenges-theories-of-universes-evolution/#ixzz2QtN60Yiq