Webb Finds Misty Moons Galaxy from Early Universe
The James Webb Space Telescope has found Misty Moons, a clumpy galaxy seen as it was 370 to 410 million years after the Big Bang, with stars forming in giant clumps magnified by a foreground cluster.
The James Webb Space Telescope has found a galaxy from the dawn of time, while its stars crowd into giant clumps that reveal how the first stars may have formed. The Misty Moons galaxy Webb discovery, reported on 6 November 2026, shows a distant galaxy seen as it was roughly 370 to 410 million years after the Big Bang, at a redshift of about 11 to 12. A team led by Minami Nakane of the University of Tokyo found it in Webb Near-Infrared Camera images of the cluster MACS J0257.1-2325, with supporting Hubble images. The findings appeared in The Astrophysical Journal on 19 October 2026, and the galaxy was nicknamed Misty Moons for its soft, cloud-like appearance.
The breakthrough came from the magnifying power of the massive foreground galaxy cluster, which bends and enlarges the light of the young galaxy behind it, a process called gravitational lensing. Smoothing the images and subtracting the blur revealed four clumps in one image of the galaxy and three in a second image, and once lensing was removed, both images showed the same structure, confirming that the clumps are real. Each clump holds about ten million solar masses of young, dust-poor stars aged 40 to 70 million years. The galaxy was found in data from the VENUS survey, a large Webb programme mapping early galaxies through lensing.
What the Misty Moons galaxy Webb find shows
The find is a window into how the first stars formed, showing that star formation in the early universe could be concentrated in large, bright clumps rather than spread smoothly across a galaxy. One caveat remains: the central clumps are bright and compact enough that the team cannot exclude a contribution from an actively feeding supermassive black hole, so some of the light, and possibly some inferred star formation, could come from accretion rather than stars alone. The discovery is not a new distance record, and the team makes no such claim. It is, instead, a detailed snapshot of a young galaxy, offering a closer look at a time when the universe was less than three percent of its present age.
Source: World Daily News Hub
