The team’s observations showed that z8-GND-5296 is forming stars extremely rapidly is forming stars extremely rapidly— producing each year ~300 times the mass of our sun. By comparison, the Milky Way forms only two to three stars per year. The new distance record-holder lies in the same part of the sky as the previous record-holder (redshift 7.2), which also happens to have a very high rate of star-formation.
“So we’re learning something about the distant universe,” said Steven Finkelstein at the University of Texas at Austin, who led the project. “There are way more regions of very high star formation than we previously thought. There must be a decent number of them if we happen to find two in the same area of the sky.”