Multiple births on cosmic scale in distant galaxy

This undated handout artist illustration provided by NASA shows a cosmic supermom. It's a galaxy that gives births to more stars in a day than ours does in a year. Astronomers used NASA's X-Ray telescope to spot this distant galaxy creating about 740 new stars a year. By comparison our Milky Way galaxy spawns just about one new star each year. This new 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. The study appears Wednesday in the journal Nature. (AP Photo/NASA)

This undated handout artist illustration provided by NASA shows a cosmic supermom. It's a galaxy that gives births to more stars in a day than ours does in a year. Astronomers used NASA's X-Ray telescope to spot this distant galaxy creating about 740 new stars a year. By comparison our Milky Way galaxy spawns just about one new star each year. This new 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. The study appears Wednesday in the journal Nature. (AP Photo/NASA)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Scientists have found a cosmic supermom. It's a galaxy that gives births to more stars in a day than ours does in a year.

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

This new 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.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/b2f0ca3a594644ee9e50a8ec4ce2d6de/Article_2012-08-15-Supermom%20Galaxy/id-1d3430538c0e4348af9ac4fe3ab1c120

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