New year, new milestone: A cosmic quirk of nature has allowed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to capture images of 44 individual stars in a galaxy halfway across the observable universe — this region is so distant that astronomers once deemed identifying individual stars in it impossible, like using binoculars to spot dust grains inside craters on the moon.
"I never dreamed of Webb seeing them in such large numbers," Rogier Windhorst, an astronomer at the Arizona State University, who was part of the discovery team, said in a statement. "And now here we are observing these stars popping in and out of the images taken only a year apart, like fireflies in the night. Webb continues to amaze us all."
