Webb telescope spots record number of stars in distant galaxy

NASA celebrates Webb telescope anniversary

NASA celebrates James Webb telescope anniversary with new images 05:25

NASA's powerful Webb Telescope has spotted more than 40 ancient stars in a distant galaxy, researchers said in a new study.

The study, published Monday in Nature, said the researchers used a technique called gravitational lensing to identify the stars. The phenomenon occurs when light bends around a large celestial body, making objects in space seem closer than they appear. 

Because of this, the scientists behind the study were able to get a look at 44 stars in the "Dragon Arc," a part of the Abell 370 galaxy cluster. The arc is about 6.5 billion light-years away from Earth. Without gravitational lensing, trying to identify individual stars so far away would be like trying to look at dust on the moon, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in a statement. 

Even with gravitational lensing acting as a magnifying glass, researchers can usually only spot one or a few stars at a time. Light bent around the galaxy cluster, the Center for Astrophysics said, and turned the Dragon Arc, which is normally spiral-shaped, into a "hall of mirrors of cosmic proportions." That allowed researchers to see dozens of stars at once. 

The galaxy cluster Abell 370, with the "Dragon Arc" visible to the lower left of center.  NASA

"This groundbreaking discovery demonstrates, for the first time, that studying large numbers of individual stars in a distant galaxy is possible," study co-author Fengwu Sun said in the statement from the Center for Astrophysics. "While previous studies with the Hubble Space Telescope found around seven stars, we now have the capability to resolve stars that were previously outside of our capability."

The stars themselves are also impressive. Many are red supergiants, like the star Betelgeuse in Earth's galaxy. The galaxy they were found in was formed when the universe was about half its current age, the study said. Further observations of the galaxy might allow for studies of these types of stars, the researchers noted, which would allow scientists to learn more about the stars themselves and the way the universe was formed. 

"Importantly, observing more individual stars will also help us better understand dark matter in the lensing plane of these galaxies and stars, which we couldn't do with only the handful of individual stars observed previously," Sun said. 

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