By Nadia Drake
Nearly 6 billion light-years away, one of the most massive galaxy clusters ever seen is birthing stars at an incredible rate, with its central member producing more than 700 suns per year in its cold, cold heart.
“It should be producing less than one, and it’s producing 740,” says Michael McDonald of MIT, coauthor of a study describing the cluster in the Aug. 16 Nature.
The cluster’s cold core and excessive fertility suggest the presence of a slacker black hole at the galaxy’s center. Normally, radiation from a supermassive black hole — in this case, something around 10 billion times the mass of the sun — warms the surrounding environment, making it hard for gas to coalesce into stars. Whether the black hole in this cluster is simply overworked, permanently off-duty or just taking a break is unclear, but scientists guess they’ve captured the cluster at an exceptionally frisky moment with respect to star formation.