James Webb Observatory detects the oldest star clusters ever seen

 NASA's James Webb Space Observatory has captured what is believed to be the oldest "star cluster" ever seen. This "stellar clump" of millions of stars is believed to be the first and oldest stars in the universe, according to the researchers who discovered it.

These results came from a scientific analysis of the image taken by the James Webb Observatory of the "first depth field", which contains thousands of sparkling galaxies, which became famous for being the first images taken by the giant space observatory of NASA, according to the British newspaper The Independent.

"This deepfield-first discovery already provides a detailed look at the first stage of star formation, underscoring the incredible power of the James Webb Space Observatory," says Lamia Mulla, a fellow at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto and co-lead author of the study.

These findings are just the latest breakthrough from the James Webb Space Observatory, which scientists have suggested could fundamentally change the way we work in astronomy because of the vast amount of data it can provide to scientists. And just in recent days, the observatory has tracked NASA's pioneering DART mission from a distance and provided new insights into the planet Neptune.

Currently, it has been used to start a search that could end with the discovery of the oldest stars ever hidden in that early image of the observatory that delighted the world. From that image, the researchers focused their work on one of the galaxies, the "Sparkler" galaxy, which is 9 billion light-years from Earth, but can be seen in part because of the "sparkle" that surrounds it, which appears as orange dots.

Scientists think that the sparkle could be newly formed clusters that create stars, or it could be older clusters, which are ancient groups of stars that formed at the beginning of the galaxy's formation. Scientists examined 12 of these objects and found that 5 of them are ancient clusters - some of the oldest ever observed. These clusters are so old that they were born almost as close as possible to galaxy formation because they were in fact forming stars.

"Because we've been able to detect brightness across a range of wavelengths, we can model them and better understand their physical properties, such as their age and the number of stars they contain," Karthik Lear, a fellow at the University of Toronto's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics and a co-author of the study, said in a statement. Knowing that clusters can be observed from such vast distances with the James Webb Observatory will stimulate more science and the search for similar objects."

Until now, those objects around the Sparkler Galaxy have already been difficult to see, but the increased sensitivity of NASA's new telescope means they can be looked at closely enough to understand what they are, and how old they might be.

It is noteworthy that the new results were published in an article entitled "The Sparkler: An Advanced Set of High Redshifts of Star Clusters Captured by the James Webb Space Observatory" published in the "Astrophysical Journal Letters".