Monstrous Galaxy forming stars a thousand times faster than Milky Way

The "Monstrous Galaxy", also known as COSMOS-AzTEC-1, formed only 2 billion years after the Big Bang and converts more than a thousand gas suns into stars each year.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile has studied a galaxy that does not look anything like what the researchers expected. It is forming stars at an absolutely incredible rate.

The "Monstrous Galaxy", also known as COSMOS-AzTEC-1, formed only 2 billion years after the Big Bang and converts more than a thousand gas suns into stars each year. Scientists do not yet understand these early galaxies very well, but now they have new information that can help them understand why they form stars so quickly.

Essentially, the gas condensed within the galaxy has a stronger gravitational pull on itself than the force of the galaxy's rotation or the repulsion of stars and supernovae, according to observations published in Nature.

Scientists discovered galaxies such as AzTEC-1 only two decades ago, according to the document, and have studied them to try to understand these extreme cases of stellar explosions. 

By extreme, it means that the galaxy is forming stars a thousand times faster than the Milky Way. It is believed that these ancient galaxies are the ancestors of the elliptical galaxies that exist today, according to the press release.

The new team of researchers from Japan, Germany, Mexico and the United States observed AzTEC-1 at the highest resolution used so far using the 66 parabolic antennas of the ALMA radio telescope in the Chilean desert. The physicists searched for a trace of the carbon monoxide gas inside the galaxy and created a map of it based on what they saw.

Their observations revealed groups of dense and giant gas that were sufficiently concentrated to collapse, instead of remaining stable due to the external pressure caused by the formation of stars and supernovas. These collapsing clouds could form stars extremely fast and may be exhausted in only 100 million years.

It is not yet clear how a galaxy can accumulate so much gas before starting that period of star formation so extremely fast. It may be the result of a fusion of galaxies, although there is still no evidence to support this process. It will be necessary to observe other galaxies like AzTEC-1 to answer that question.