Scientists have discovered a galaxy that's 1,000 times brighter than our Milky Way galaxy and is one of the brightest galaxies that researchers have ever discovered.
According to scientists at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), a research institute in the Canary Islands, the newly discovered galaxy located "10 thousand million light years away" is not only one of the brightest they've come across, but it also has an unusually "high rate of star formation," Engadget noted.
This new finding has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Called an ultrabright lensed submillimeter galaxy, it was discovered thanks to a galaxy cluster located in between the Milky Way and the ultrabright galaxy, according to the report.
Scientists used gravitational lensing to pinpoint the galaxy.
"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 centered on the densest part of the cluster, which is known as an 'Einstein Ring,'" Anastasio Díaz-Sánchez, one of the author's of the article, said in a statement, according to the IAC.
"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," Díaz-Sánchez said, according to the Daily Sun.
The ultrabright galaxy is forming stars at a rate of 1,000 solar masses per year.
"This type of object harbors the most powerful star forming regions known in the universe. The next step will be to study their molecular content," Susana Iglesias-Groth, an astrophysicist at IAC, said on the organization's website.