Galactic clusters are gigantic collections of galaxies held together by the force of gravity. For example, our Milky Way belongs to a recently discovered supercluster called Laniakea.
Until now it was believed that the hearts of these cosmic megalopolises were a kind of elephant cemeteries , populated exclusively by stars in the last cycle of their life or directly dead. But it seems that this is not the case in all cases, based on the discovery just made public by an international team of astronomers in The Astrophysical Journal .
According to these researchers, the cluster SpARCS1049 + 56 is a striking exception: its center is occupied by a huge galaxy that makes stars at a frenetic rate. The finding has been possible thanks to data obtained by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and other ground-based observatories , which have later been complemented with explorations by Hubble.
The SpARCS1049 + 56 datasheet produces vertigo: located 9.8 billion light-years away, it is home to at least 27 galaxies, its mass is equivalent to 400 billion suns, and it creates about 800 stars each year . As a point of comparison, it is worth saying that in the Milky Way two stars are born in the same period of time.
It seems that the galaxy where the new stars are formed recently merged with a smaller one : it would obtain the necessary gas to feed the machinery of stellar genesis. The challenge now is to find out if the case of SpARCS1049 + 56 is an anomaly or a common phenomenon in the earliest phases of the universe.
Imagen: NASA/STScI/ESA/JPL-Caltech/McGill
