Astronomers have discovered a superheated "star factory" that existed just 800 million years after the Big Bang. The star factory, a galaxy known as Y1, is birthing stars at a rate 180 times faster than the Milky Way does. The discovery of such a previously unknown extreme region of starbirth could help scientists explain how galaxies grew so quickly in the early universe.
The team discovered the nature of Y1 by first measuring the temperature of its superheated cosmic dust. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the researchers were able to analyze the light emitted by the primordial galaxy, which has been travelling to Earth for 13 billion years.
