‘Shiny, sparkly object’ in James Webb space image

The picture, presented to the world in July by US President Joe Biden, shows a fantastically deep view of the cosmos, billions of years into the past.

And it’s in that remarkable vista that researchers have now picked out what they believe to be the most distant globular clusters ever identified.

Globulars are dense star collections.

What’s more, these stars are generally really quite old and relatively pristine: they have fewer of the heavier chemical elements that taint more modern stars such as our Sun.

Our Milky Way Galaxy, in which our Sun lives, has more than 100 of these compact groupings littered around itself, but when and how they formed is still something of a puzzle.

R&I – FS