Peering incredibly far back into time, astronomers found a group of much older stars than they expected.
Those "sparks" wouldn't have been visible to us if it weren't for the power of James Webb. Thanks to the gravitational lensing in the SMACS 0723 image, the Sparkler Galaxy also appears three times due to strange distorting effects.
The image we see of the Sparkler Galaxy, in fact, shows what it looked like nine billion years ago, roughly 4.5 billion years after the Big Bang. The University of Toronto team explained that the galaxy cluster is redder than expected, meaning it is older than they would have thought, given how early it is in the Universe, relatively speaking.
That means they believe the globular sparkles formed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. They may even contain some of the very first stars to have formed in the Universe. In an interview with the, one of the astronomers, Dr. Lamiya Mowla from Toronto's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, said, "when we first opened the SMACS image, we too were searching for the furthest stuff, the farthest things.
There's nothing wrong, of course, with getting sidetracked when looking at the image of SMACS 0723 — the photograph is literally filled to the brim with tiny networks of worlds, all dating back to an ancient past much closer to the Big Bang. The truly incredible thing about that image is that we may never be able to fully analyze every tiny dot highlighted in immense detail, thanks to James Webb.
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