from latimes.com: Just 700 million years after the big bang, our most distant known galaxy was a cauldron of star production, churning out new suns hundreds of times faster than our own Milky Way galaxy, scientists say. But it was only this spring, roughly 13 billion years later, that astronomers first glimpsed evidence of this ferocious activity and confirmed the distance and age of the galaxy now designated as z8_GND_5296. In a paper published Tuesday in the journal Nature, researchers said discovery of the galaxy suggested our early universe was capable of far more star production than previously believed.