A young but completely evolved entirely self-made galaxy

So young and already so evolved: Thanks to observations obtained at the Large Binocular Telescope, an international team of researchers coordinated by Paolo Saracco of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF, Italy) was able to reconstruct the wild evolutionary history of an extremely massive galaxy that existed 12 billion years ago, when the universe was only 1.8 billion years old, less than 13% of its present age. This galaxy, dubbed C1-23152, formed in only 500 million years, an incredibly short time to give rise to a mass of about 200 billion suns. To do so, it produced as many as 450 stars per year, more than one per day, a star formation rate almost 300 times higher than the current rate in the Milky Way. The information obtained from this study will be fundamental for galaxy formation models for objects it for which it is currently difficult to account.