Webb Spots 104 Flickering Stars in Dragon Galaxy

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have found 104 distinct magnified stellar events in a single faraway galaxy, more than twice the previous record of 44 and a possible new probe of dark matter. The Dragon galaxy flickering stars study, led by Jose Maria Palencia of the Institute of Physics of Cantabria, appeared in Astronomy and Astrophysics on 30 September 2026 and was reported by Phys.org on 8 November 2026. The galaxy, known as the Dragon, is a stretched arc of light lying behind the galaxy cluster Abell 370, at a redshift of about 0.725. It was the first giant arc ever identified, and it has long been a favourite target for researchers who want to see single stars at great distance.

The team compared Webb images taken between 2022 and 2024 and looked for points of light that had changed brightness from one visit to the next. The flickers are short-lived, with observed timescales typically lasting days to weeks, although the largest stars can stay visible for months. Gravitational lensing by the foreground cluster magnifies the distant stars, briefly bringing individual stars into view that would otherwise be far too faint to see. That magnification turns the Dragon into a natural telescope, allowing astronomers to study stars in a galaxy that lies billions of light-years away, one star at a time.

How Dragon galaxy flickering stars may probe dark matter

The study treats fuzzy dark matter as one possible reading of the pattern, not as a detection of a dark matter particle, and it does not settle what dark matter is. The number and timing of the flickers can, in principle, reveal how mass is distributed in the lensing cluster, including any smooth, wave-like component that fuzzy dark matter models predict. The paper is peer-reviewed, and the dark matter reading is a tentative interpretation within it, to be tested with further observations. For now, the record count of 104 events shows how much information Webb can extract from repeated visits to a single lensed galaxy, and how much remains to be learned from its archive.

Source: Daily Inference