Next time a child asks you where stars come from, point them straight to this new discovery of tiny star-spawning galaxies from Nasa's Hubble telescope.
The Hubble team have looked nine billion years back in time, to find a new star nursery brimming with youngsters. The galaxies produce stars at such a rate that the number of stars in them would double in ten million years.
Nasa say The Milky Way has taken a thousand times longer to double its number of stars.
Arjen van der Wel of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany said: “The galaxies have been there all along, but up until recently astronomers have been able only to survey tiny patches of sky at the sensitivities necessary to detect them,” says
Van der Wel's paper detailing the discovery will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal, which if it's not your monthly favourite, should be.
“We weren’t looking specifically for these galaxies, but they stood out because of their unusual colours,” he added.
The observations suggest that these types of galaxies may have been very common nine billion years ago. The reason behind their sporadic spawning of stars remains a mystery, but computer simulations show that star formation like this may have occurred in short bursts.