NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most complex space observatory in history that serves thousands of astronomers around the world, captured a unique image that revealed 44 individual stars in a galaxy located 6.5 billion light years from the Milky Way, according to an article published Monday in Nature Astronomy.
Astronomers used high-resolution optics and distortion in Webb space to reveal the existence of dozens of previously unknown stars, the researchers said.
The detection of a “treasure trove” of stars was only possible because the light from the 44 new stars was amplified by a large galaxy cluster, called Abell 370, in front of it, according to the Center for Astrophysics.
This technique is known as gravitational lensing, which occurs when a massive amount of matter creates a gravitational field that distorts and amplifies light from distant galaxies that are behind it but in the same line of sight, according to NASA. The effect is essentially like looking through a giant magnifying glass.
The high gravitational magnification has allowed astronomers to detect faint background sources and study their internal structures, which can lead to identifying individual stars in distant galaxies, according to the paper.
Gravitational lensing is also known as “Einstein’s ring” because the famous physicist Albert Einstein predicted this possibility in his theory of general relativity.
A visible arc created by gravitational lensing and the bending of light beyond Abell 370 has been nicknamed the “Dragon Arc”. After carefully analyzing the colors of each of the stars inside the Dragon’s Arc, the researchers discovered that many are red supergiants, which are stars in their final stages of life.
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