back to article Randy dwarf galaxies are making billions of baby stars

The Hubble telescope has picked out distant dwarf galaxies that are churning out stars at an enormous rate compared to the Milky Way. The 18 tiny galaxies – pictured below – are about a hundred times smaller than our galaxy, but they're birthing stars so furiously that they will see the number of stellar bodies double in just …

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  1. Anon

    Ooh, shiny!

  2. metaspective
    Happy

    More stars...

    ...than X-Factor, and much more interesting.

    1. Pete the not so great
      Devil

      The X factor has stars?

  3. Ragarath
    Joke

    Antimatter

    Well all that anti-matter had to go somewhere. Perhaps it is living in stars.

    1. Ugotta B. Kiddingme
      Pint

      in all seriousness...

      That's sort of what I have often wondered. Scientists speculate as to the whereabouts of all the anti-matter. How do we know that anti-matter didn't clump into anti-matter galaxies just like "regular" matter did? Galaxies are sufficiently far apart that an anti-matter galaxy and a matter galaxy should be able to peacefully coexist as "close" neighbors without incident.

      And as a loosely related question, how do we really know that what we call the laws of physics are all the same in distant galaxies as they are here? Particularly if a distant galaxy were composed of anti-matter? Or a denser-than-usual clump of so-called dark matter (dark anti-matter?) The biggest problem of all is that we do not know what we do not know. Science marches on in search of the answers, but for now we stumble on in the feeble glow of that tiny candle representing humanity's understanding of the universe.

      Beer for boffins, in exchange for knowledge/understanding/really cool pictures from deep space.

  4. compton

    Us laypeople really need a bit more help understanding this! The implication seems to be that galaxies produce stars in proportion to their mass, in a repeating cycle of gas clouds condensing to form stars which go supernova creating gas clouds etc

    So the dwarf galaxies are producing approx 10 times as many stars per unit of galactic mass than the milky way (according to my shaky calculations at least)

    Which is pretty cool, but I suspect my assumptions are probably wrong, unfortunately this article (and NASA's one) doesn't provide enough info to fill in the gaps.

    Any knowledgeable astronomers out there??

    1. John I'm only dancing
      Thumb Up

      Not a knowledgabe astronomer but

      It is possible that these dwarf galaxies may have the same mass as our own Milky Way but a fraction of the size. As a consequence, everything would be speeded up, hence the rapid creation of new stars due to the gravitational attraction, i.e. everything is much closer together.

      That's just my theory, and the barest of information available, is as good as anybody elses, if not better.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Randy dwarfs?

    I was expecting this to be a story about the English rugby team.

  6. Andrew A
    Headmaster

    Rather than "prolific" in the sub-headline, "fecund" would have been the perfect word to use!

    Also, the light from distant galaxies has taken quite some time to get here, so we're seeing what happened over there x million years ago. Makes sense to me that galaxies used to create stars more quickly than they do nowadays.

  7. Mips
    Childcatcher

    Obvious question

    9billion years ago how fast was the milky way galaxy creating stars?

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