A study, with the participation of the IAC, has detected the most distant known galaxy with explosive star formation that began its production when the Universe was very young. While the Milky Way creates one star a year, this galaxy produces around 3000 stars in the same period. This find challenges theories explaining the formation and evolution of galaxies, which claim that a galaxy of such characteristics could not exist so early in the life of the Universe. The Milky Way is capable of forming approximately one star per year. The new galaxy identified in this study, in which the

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The investigation is published in the latest issue of the journal 'Science'

2012 DA14: 49,000 kilometres in 106 minutes

The popular magazine Astronomy, one of the most widely read in the English-speaking world gives second place in its annual discovery league table an investigation led by the IAC, first place going to the discovery of the Higgs boson. More than a thousand years after the event occurred, the research team has determined that it originated in the collision and subsequent fusion of two white dwarf stars. Last September, the journal Nature dedicated its cover to a Spanish investigation led by Jonay González Hernández, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC). The

2012 DA14 will pass some 27,700 kilometres from the surface of the Earth next Friday, 15 February. It will be the closest ever non-impacting encounter since the orbits of these bodies have been studied, although it won't be visible to the naked eye