Astronomers may have found some of the very earliest stars thanks to James Webb – Interesting Engineering

The University of Toronto team originally thought that the "sparks" might actually be separate objects far past or in front of the Sparkler Galaxy. However, the fact that all three versions of the Sparkler Galaxy show the same dots strongly suggests they are connected.

The astronomers believe the sparkles are globular clusters like the ones seen around the Milky Way. Crucially, though, we're seeing clusters that are much, much older and were created at a much earlier time in the history of the Universe.

The image we see of the Sparkler Galaxy, in fact, shows what it looked like nine billion years ago, roughly 4.5 billion years after the Big Bang. The University of Toronto team explained that the galaxy cluster is redder than expected, meaning it is older than they would have thought, given how early it is in the Universe, relatively speaking.

That means they believe the globular sparkles formed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. They may even contain some of the very first stars to have formed in the Universe. In an interview with the BBC, one of the astronomers, Dr. Lamiya Mowla from Toronto's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, said, "when we first opened the SMACS image, we too were searching for the furthest stuff, the farthest things. And then we literally got sidetracked by the shiniest, sparkly object."

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Astronomers may have found some of the very earliest stars thanks to James Webb - Interesting Engineering