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Cambridge, MA - Astronomers have combined a natural gravitational lens and a sophisticated telescope array to get the sharpest view ever of "star factories" in a galaxy over 10 billion light-years from Earth. They found that the distant galaxy, known as SMM J2135-0102, is making new stars 250 times faster than our Galaxy, the Milky Way. They also pinpointed four discrete star-forming regions within the galaxy, each over 100 times brighter than locations (like the Orion Nebula) where stars form in our Galaxy. This is the first time that astronomers have been able to study properties of individual star-forming regions within a galaxy so far from Earth. "To a layperson, our images appear fuzzy, but to us, they show the exquisite detail of a Faberge egg," said Steven Longmore of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Longmore is an author of the paper describing these findings, which was published in the March 21st Nature online. Due to the time it takes light to travel to us, we see the galaxy as it existed just 3 billion years after the Big Bang.
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