James Webb Space Telescope

Astronomers setting their sights halfway across the observable universe recently identified the largest amount of individual stars ever detected so far away – a feat once considered near-impossible.

To make the historic discovery, the team of researchers turned to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and its high-resolution power to reveal 44 individual stars in a galaxy so far away, that its light dates back to when the universe was half its age.

The discovery marks the largest number of individual stars ever detected in the distant universe. The team's findings, which were published Monday in the journal Nature, also unveil a method of investigating dark matter, which remains one of the universe's greatest mysteries, study co-author Fengwu Sun said.

"This groundbreaking discovery demonstrates, for the first time, that studying large numbers of individual stars in a distant galaxy is possible," Sun, of the Center for Astrophysics, a research institute jointly operated by the Harvard College Observatory and Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, said in a statement.

Most galaxies, including our Milky Way, contain tens of billions of stars that are readily observable. Even in nearby galaxies, such as Andromeda, which is about 2.5 million light-years away, astronomers can observe stars one by one.

But when astronomers look at distant galaxies billions of light-years away, individual stars can appear fuzzy – blended as their light travels great distances to reach us on Earth. For that reason, astronomers have long struggled to study how distant galaxies form and evolve.

"To us, galaxies that are very far away usually look like a diffuse, fuzzy blob," study lead author Yoshinobu Fudamoto, an astronomer at Chiba University in Japan, said in a statement. "But actually, those blobs consist of many, many individual stars."

Thanks to recent scientific advances, astronomers are only now getting better at observing those individual distant stars. Using a technique called gravitational lensing, the team of researchers was able to make their historic stellar discovery in a distant galaxy located nearly 6.5 billion light-years from Earth.

As first predicted by Albert Einstein, gravitational lensing occurs when a massive celestial body causes a sufficient curvature of spacetime for the path of light around it to be visibly bent, as if by a lens. The effect can amplify the light of distant stars, making it possible for instruments like the Webb telescope to detect them.............

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