“The Redshift Galaxy” –Discovered at Dawn of the Universe Bright as a Quasar - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

In January 2019, astronomers using data from the Nasa/ESA Hubble Space Telescope announced that the discovery of the brightest quasar ever seen in the early universe with a brightness of about 600 trillion suns –by far the brightest nucleus ever found of an active galaxy and its powerful glow created by the energy released by gas falling towards the supermassive black hole at its center several hundred million times as massive as our sun.

Right: Artist`s drawing of the burst of star formation in BOSS-EUVLG1, which contains a large number of young massive stars, and hardly any dust.

The study revealed that the high luminosity of BOSS-EUVLG1 in the ultraviolet and in Lyman-alpha emission is due to the large number of young, massive stars in the galaxy.

However, in quasars the high luminosity is due to the activity around the supermassive black holes in their nuclei, and not to star formation

“BOSS-EUVLG1 seems to be dominated by a burst of formation of young, very massive stars, with hardly any dust, and with a very low metallicity, explains Rui Marques Chaves, a researcher at the CAB, formerly a doctoral student at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and the University of La Laguna (ULL), and first author of the article

The rate of star formation in this galaxy is very high, around a thousand solar masses per year, around a thousand times higher than that in the Milky Way, although the galaxy is 30 times smaller

“This rate of star formation is comparable only to the most luminous infrared galaxies known, but the absence of dust in BOSS-EUVLG1 allows its ultraviolet and visible emission to reach us with hardly any attenuation”, explains Ismael Pérez Fournon, an IAC researcher and a co-author

So, the results of the study suggest that BOSS-EUVLG1 is an example of the initial phases of the formation of massive galaxies

In spite of its high luminosity and star formation rate, its low metallicity shows that the galaxy has hardly had time to enrich its interstellar medium with dust and newly formed metals