Although National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Hubble Space Telescope has provided significant information of the distant universe, it also has a limit till which it can spot planets and galaxies.

However, researchers recently cleverly pushed the telescope's limit to discover a cluster of new stars!

Astronomers reportedly have obtained images10 times sharper than what Hubble could achieve on its own, by applyinga new computational analysis to a galaxy magnified by a gravitational lens.

The images obtained by the telescope show anedge-on disk galaxy, which is studded with brilliant patches of newly-formed stars.

"When we saw the reconstructed image we said, 'Wow, it looks like fireworks are going off everywhere,'" astronomer Jane Rigby of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland said.

The cluster of stars in the galaxy are so far away that we see it as it appeared 11 billion years ago, only 2.7 billion years after the big bang.

The cluster of stars is one of more than 70 strongly lensed galaxies studied by the Hubble Space Telescope.

In this Hubble photograph of a distant galaxy cluster, a spotty blue arc stands out against a background of red galaxies. That arc is actually three separate images of the same background galaxy.NASA, ESA, and T. Johnson (University of Michigan)

The gravity of a giant cluster of galaxies between the target galaxy and Earth distorts the more distant galaxy's light. It stretches the light into an arc and magnifies it almost 30 times more.

The astronomers had to develop a special computer code to remove all the distortions caused by the gravitational lens. After the code was implemented, the researchers were able to see the disk galaxy as it would normally appear without the magnifying light.

The galaxy cluster SDSS J1110 6459 is located about 6 billion light-years from Earth and contains hundreds of galaxies.NASA, ESA, and T. Johnson (University of Michigan)

The image of the galaxy, which was reconstructed, showed twodozen clumps of newborn stars, each spanning about 200 to 300 light-years.

"There are star-forming knots as far down in size as we can see," said doctoral student Traci Johnson of the University of Michigan, lead author of two of the three papers describing the research.

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NASA's Hubble telescope pushed beyond limits, astronomers find new stars in distant galaxy - International Business Times, India Edition