The space agency’s Hubble Space Telescope has pictured the galaxy named UGC 6093, at a distance of 500 million light years.
The galaxy has been classified as a barred spiral galaxy – which means a galaxy with spectacular arms that swirl outwards from its core.
It is also classified as an active galaxy – because it hosts a galactic nucleus (centre) or a compact core – which drags materials towards a supermassive black hole.
As this black hole devours surrounding matter, it emits intense radiation, causing it to shine brightly.
But this newly-captured UGC 6093 is more “exotic” than a regular active galaxy, reports Express.co.uk.
The UGC 6093 essentially acts as a giant astronomical laser that spews out light at microwave (not visible) wavelengths.
This type of object is dubbed a megamaser.
And megamasers such as that of the UGC 6093 can be some 100 million times brighter than masers found in galaxies such as the Milky Way.
The discovery comes after two huge galaxies merged in a distant part of the universe, which left experts wondering how they form.
Astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile to find galaxies that began to form 780 million years after the universe came into existence.
An associate professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, Dan Marrone, said: "With these exquisite ALMA observations, astronomers are seeing the most massive galaxy known in the first billion years of the universe in the process of assembling itself.
"We usually view that as the time of little galaxies working hard to chew away at the neutral intergalactic medium.
“Mounting observational evidence with ALMA, however, has helped to reshape that story and continues to push back the time at which truly massive galaxies first emerged in the universe.”