Photos from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed more than 40 stars within the gravitationally lensed

James Webb telescope spies record-breaking hoard of stars hiding in a warped 'dragon' galaxy

submited by

Style Pass

2025-01-08 15:30:08

Photos from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed more than 40 stars within the gravitationally lensed "Dragon Arc" galaxy, 6.5 billion light-years from Earth. It is the largest group of individually imaged stars ever seen at such a distance.

Astronomers armed with exceptionally detailed James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images have discovered dozens of ancient stars from a distant, gravitationally warped galaxy. The stellar haul, which was uncovered thanks to a space-time phenomenon predicted by Einstein, is the largest of its kind ever seen so far away.

The newly imaged stars are located within the "Dragon Arc," a spiral galaxy roughly 6.5 billion light-years from Earth when the universe was around half its current age. Normally, such distant stars are too far away to be seen in detail. But part of the Dragon Arc has been magnified by gravitational lensing, a phenomenon first predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity in 1915.

Gravitational lensing occurs when light from a distant object passes through space-time that's been bent out of shape by the immense gravity of another massive object located between the distant object and the observer. This mishaped space-time magnifies the distant object’s light and warps it into new shapes, such as circular halos known as Einstein rings. In this case, light from the Dragon Arc has been warped by the gravity of Abell 370 — a cluster of galaxies located roughly 4 billion light-years from Earth. As a result, the distant galaxy has been stretched out into an arc of magnified light.