"I never dreamed of this": James Webb telescope captures a record number of stars in a distant galaxy

James Webb Space Telescope has managed to capture images of 44 individual stars in a distant galaxy. This is a record number, as scientists could not even dream of identifying individual stars in such a vast space - it seemed impossible.

This discovery is a technological feat. In addition, it provides an opportunity to study the elusive behavior of dark matter, Space.com writes.

"I never dreamed of Webb seeing them in such large numbers. AAnd now here we are observing these stars popping in and out of the images taken only a year apart, like fireflies in the night. Webb continues to amaze us all," said Rogier Windhorst, an astronomer at Arizona State University who was part of the research team.

The newly discovered 44 stars - the largest collection of stars ever observed in the distant Universe - belong to a hidden galaxy whose light has been distorted into a long tendril in the image on the left, scientists say. This light from the galaxy, dubbed the Dragon, began traveling through space about 6.5 billion years ago, experts say.

After analyzing the colors of each of the newly discovered stars in the Dragon, researchers concluded that they are red supergiants in the final stages of their lives.

Scientists say that in fact, the Dragon is a mixture of several duplicated images of the same background spiral galaxy, a cosmic mirage caused by the random arrangement behind the Abell 370 galaxy cluster.

According to astronomers, Abell 370 is home to several hundred gravitationally bound galaxies about 4 billion light-years away in the constellation of Cetus. And about a hundred other distant, invisible worlds appear in the photo as faint streaks of light tangled in the cluster of galaxies.

"This groundbreaking discovery demonstrates, for the first time, that studying large numbers of individual stars in a distant galaxy is possible. While previous studies with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope found around seven stars, we now have the capability to resolve stars that were previously outside of our capability," said co-author Fengwu Sun.

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