James Poling

While it is not a delicious, chewy, fruit flavored galaxy far away, it’s still pretty freaking amazing.

Long ago, astronomers spotted a galaxy far away and wondered why it was giving birth to so many stars. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, they have finally figured out the answer to the puzzle: The starburst galaxy turns out to be farther away than they thought.

Rather than being all by its lonesome, just 7 million light-years away, the starburst galaxy NGC 1569 is stuck in the middle of crowded galactic cluster nearly 11 million light-years away. The resulting gravitational interactions are probably squeezing the galaxy’s gas so much that it’s been forming stars at a rate more than 100 times faster than our own Milky Way … for the past 100 million years or so.

“This was the strongest starburst galaxy in the nearby universe,” Alessandra Aloisi, an astronomer at the Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute and the European Space Agency, told me today. “It was really puzzling why it was forming stars at such a high rate. It wasn’t fitting in with current theories.”

This also reminds me of a conversation I was having the other day about the sad but inevitable demise of the Hubble.  NASA has claimed that if the telescope breaks down again it will not be fixed, that its lifespan has run its course.  Let’s hope there is something bigger and better in line to replace the Hubble quickly when it does reach it’s end.

Just a few weeks ago NASA rebooted several critical backup units on board the Hubble to repair the primary instrument control and data formatting unit which failed in late September this year causing the telescope to shutdown.  The first image the Hubble produced after being rebooted was astonishing.