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june 15, 2017 - Hubble Telescope
Jackpot! Cosmic Magnifying-Glass Effect Captures Universe's Brightest Galaxies
Galaxies Shine with the Brilliance of up to 100 Trillion Suns
Astronomers were fascinated in the 1980s with the discovery of nearby dustenshrouded galaxies that glowed thousands of times brighter than our Milky Way galaxy in infrared light. Dubbed ultraluminous infrared galaxies, they were starmaking factories, churning out a prodigious amount of stars every year. What wasn't initially clear was what powered these giant infrared light bulbs. Observations by the Hubble Space Telescope helped astronomers confirm the source of the galaxies' light output. Many of them reside within "nests" of galaxies engaged in multiple pileups of three, four or even five galaxies. The dust is produced by the firestorm of star birth, which glows fiercely in infrared light.
Now Hubble is illuminating the bright galaxies' distant dustenshrouded cousins. Boosted by natural magnifying lenses in space, Hubble has captured unique closeup views of the universe's brightest infrared galaxies. The galaxies are ablaze with runaway star formation, pumping out more than 10,000 new stars a year. This unusually rapid star birth is occurring at the peak of the universe's starmaking boom more than 8 billion years ago. The star birth frenzy creates lots of dust, which enshrouds the galaxies, making them too faint to detect in visible light. But they glow fiercely in infrared light, shining with the brilliance of 10 trillion to 100 trillion suns.
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