Scientists have found a cosmic supermom. It's a galaxy that gives births to more stars in a day than ours does in a year.
Astronomers used NASA's Chandra X-Ray telescope to spot this distant galaxy creating about 740 new stars a year. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy spawns about one new star each year.
This new galaxy is about 5.7 billion light years away. It is in the center of a recently discovered cluster of galaxies that give the brightest X-ray glow astronomers have seen.
MIT astronomer Michael McDonald says the galaxy is strange in another way. It's about 6 billion years old and this type of galaxy normally doesn't birth stars at that advanced age.
The finding was reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.
© Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.