Scientists discover brightest galaxy, 10 thousand million light years away from Milky Way

A new galaxy has been discovered by the scientists, which is around 10 thousand million light years away and 1,000 times brighter than the Milky Way galaxy.

The researchers said that it is the brightest of all the sub-millimetre galaxies and also have a very strong emission in the far infrared.

Gravitational lensing was used by the scientists led by Anastasio Diaz-Sanches from Polytechnic University of Cartagena (UPCT) in Spain. The lensing acts as a sort of magnifier, changing the size and intensity of the apparent image of the original object.

Diaz-Sanchez said, "Thanks to the gravitational lens produced by a cluster of galaxies between ourselves and the source, which acts as if it was a telescope, the galaxy appears 11 times bigger and brighter than it really is, and appears as several images on an arc centred on the densest part of the cluster, which is known as an Einstein Ring."

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"The advantage of this kind of amplification is that it does not distort the spectral properties of the light, which can be studied for these very distant objects as if they were much nearer," he further added.

A search of the whole sky was carried out to find this new galaxy, combining the data bases of the satellites WISE and Planck in order to identify the brightest sub-millimetre galaxies. 

The galaxy is notable for having a high rate of star formation. It forms stars at a rate of 1,000 solar masses per year, which is twice the rate of the Milky Way.

Susana Iglesias-Groth, an astrophysicist at Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) in Spain said, "This type of object harbours the most powerful star forming regions known in the universe. The next step will be to study their molecular content."

The fact that the galaxy is so bright, its light being gravitationally amplified, is what allowed scientists to look into its internal properties, which would otherwise not be possible with such distant galaxies. The research was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

With PTI inputs.

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