'The early universe is nothing like we expected': James Webb telescope reveals 'new understanding' of how galaxies formed at cosmic dawn

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered what could be the earliest star clusters in the universe.

JWST spotted the five proto-globular clusters — swarms of millions of stars bound together by gravity — inside the Cosmic Gems arc, a galaxy that formed just 460 million years after the Big Bang. 

The Cosmic Gems arc gets its name from its appearance: When seen from our solar system, the star-studded galaxy looks like a hair-thin crescent due to the powerful gravitational influence of a foreground galaxy, which magnifies and distorts the distant galaxy's appearance. 

The galaxy is the most highly magnified region seen in the first 500 million years of our universe, giving astronomers an unprecedented window into how the stirrings of the first stars sculpted galaxies during cosmic dawn. 

Cosmic dawn is the time encompassing the first billion years of the universe. Roughly 400 million years after the Big Bang, the Epoch of Reionization began, in which light from nascent stars stripped hydrogen of their electrons, leading to a fundamental reshaping of galaxy structures. 

"The early universe is nothing like we expected," study first author Angela Adamo, an astronomer at Stockholm University, told Live Science. "Galaxies are more luminous, they form stars at break-neck speed, and they do so in massive and dense star clusters. We are building a new understanding of how early galaxies formed."

The researchers published their findings June 24 in the journal Nature.