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LONDON: A far-away galaxy, shining with the light of 300 trillion suns, has been discovered by NASA. It’s being called the most luminous galaxy ever seen.
It’s 12.5 billion light-years away from Earth, so the light we’re seeing from the galaxy is from 12.5 billion years ago.
“We are looking at a very intense phase of galaxy evolution,” said Chao-Wei Tsai of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., lead author of a new study about the discovery that appeared in The Astrophysical Journal.
The galaxy was spotted by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a space telescope orbiting around the Earth. WISE scans the entire sky in infrared light, picking up the glow of hundreds of millions of objects.
The galaxy, known by the rather inelegant name of WISE J224607.57-052635.0, is part of a new class of objects recently discovered by WISE, which are known as extremely luminous infrared galaxies (ELIRGs).
Amazingly, at the center of this most luminous galaxy, is a gigantic black hole, scientists say.
