New York, Nov 13 (IANS): Astronomers have found a galaxy called AzTEC-3 that gives birth to 500 times the number of suns than our own galaxy the Milky Way annually.

The galaxy, observed to be emerging from the Big Bang's primordial soup, creates about 1,100 suns a year, corresponding to about three suns each day, showed a study at Cornell University in the US.

An international team of researchers gazed back - with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile - over 12.5 billion years to find bustling galaxies creating stars at a breakneck rate.

"The ALMA data reveal that AzTEC-3 is a very compact, highly disturbed galaxy that is bursting with new stars at close to its theoretically predicted maximum limit and is surrounded by a population of more normal, but also actively star-forming galaxies," said Dominik Riechers, assistant professor of astronomy at the Cornell University in the US.

"This particular grouping of galaxies represents an important milestone in the evolution of our universe - the formation of a galaxy cluster and the early assemblage of large, mature galaxies," added Reicher.

The team also found for the first time star-forming gas in three additional and extremely distant members of an emerging galactic protocluster, associated with AzTEC-3.

"One of the primary science goals of ALMA is the detection and detailed study of galaxies throughout cosmic time," added Chris Carilli, astronomer with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, New Mexico.

The astronomers believe that AzTEC-3 and the other nearby galaxies appear to be part of the same system, but are not yet gravitationally bound into a clearly defined cluster. This is why the astronomers refer to them collectively as a protocluster.

"AzTEC-3 is currently undergoing an extreme, but short-lived event," Riechers said.

The study was published in the Astrophysical Journal.