What is the Baby Boom Galaxy?
Q: What is the Baby Boom Galaxy?
A: The Baby Boom Galaxy is a starburst galaxy located 12.2 billion light years away that was discovered by NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology.
Q: How bright is the Baby Boom Galaxy?
A: The Baby Boom Galaxy is the brightest starburst galaxy in the very distant universe, its brightness being a measure of its extreme star-formation rate.
Q: How many stars does it produce per year?
A: The Baby Boom Galaxy produces up to 4,000 stars per year, while our Milky Way galaxy produces an average of just 10 stars per year.
Q: What challenges does this discovery present for accepted models of galaxy formation?
A: This discovery challenges the accepted model for galaxy formation which has most galaxies slowly bulking up by absorbing pieces of other galaxies, rather than growing internally.
Q: When was this galaxy observed?
A: Scientists are observing this galaxy at a time when the universe was only a little over 1.4 billion years old, indicating that it was doing this when the universe was still in its infancy.
Q: Why did Peter Capak refer to it as "the extreme stellar machine"?
A: Peter Capak referred to it as "the extreme stellar machine" because it has such an extremely high rate of star production compared to other galaxies.
Q: What did Nick Scoville say about this discovery?
A: Nick Scoville said that they may be witnessing, for the first time, the formation of one of the most massive elliptical galaxies in the universe with this discovery.
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