Astronomers have uncovered the "greenest" galaxy that has a 100 percent efficiency rate of converting fuel into stars.
NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the IRAM Plateau de Bure interferometer in the French Alps and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have announced the discovery of the universe's "greenest" galaxy that has a 100 percent efficiency rate of converting fuel into stars.
"This galaxy is remarkably efficient," said Jim Geach of McGill University in Canada, lead author of a new study appearing in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "It's converting its gas supply into new stars at the maximum rate thought possible."
Stars are usually created from clouds of gas that collide with each other in the galaxies. In the Milky Way, astronomers have found that only a small part of the total gas supply actively form stars, while the majority of total gas supply lies inactive. The gas supply is distributed evenly throughout the galaxy and most of the new stars are formed within discrete, dense "knots" in the spiral arms.
In the case of this newly discovered galaxy, which has been named SDSSJ1506+54, most of the gas is driven to the central core of the galaxy where it is ignited to form a powerful burst of stars. The findings from this discovery will help astronomers better understand the concept and functionality behind central star-forming regions of galaxies.
The discovery was made when astronomers saw it using data from WISE's all-sky infrared survey. NASA stated the galaxy is at such a distance that the light from it took more than 6 billion years to reach the Earth.
Ned Wright of UCLA, the WISE principal investigator pointed out that WISE has been programmed to scan the entire sky and detect rare galaxies that stand out among the rest like the SDSSJ1506+54. Observations also revealed that the galaxy is extremely compact.
Astronomers predict that in the next few tens of millions of years, all the gas in the galaxy will be used up and the galaxy will be converted into a massive elliptical galaxy
