This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Gravitational lensing is one of astronomy's best tricks for seeing the early universe. When a massive galaxy cluster sits in between the observer and a distant object, its gravity bends and magnifies the distant object's light, acting like a giant natural magnifying glass.
Galaxies that would otherwise be too faint to spot suddenly come into view because of gravitational lensing. Using this effect, astronomers have now identified a galaxy nicknamed Misty Moons that existed when the universe was less than 500 million years old. Located at a redshift of roughly 11 to 12, the galaxy is magnified by the gravity of a foreground galaxy cluster, which allowed researchers to reconstruct its internal structure.
Their paper was published in The Astrophysical Journal on Oct. 19. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been able to find many galaxies from the early universe, when it was only a few hundred million years old. Some galaxies appear too bright and have a lot of nitrogen yet are very tiny.
The brightness, astronomers think, may hold clues about globular clusters and star formation patterns in the early universe. Star clusters from the early times tend to be low in heavy elements. They are also extremely dense, in some cases about 1,000 times denser than young star clusters nearby.
In our local universe, researchers measure a quantity called the cluster formation efficiency (CFE) to understand what fraction of a galaxy's newly formed stars end up in bound star clusters. Some studies have shown that this efficiency correlates with star formation rate. Since early galaxies were forming stars at a high rate, their CFE might have been very high.
But examining individual star clusters in a massive galaxy so far away is tricky as these early galaxies are too small and distant to be resolved into their components. So, when a massive galaxy cluster acts as a natural lens, the distant object appears brighter and magnified. This allows astronomers to pick out individual clumps and examine their properties.
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