TOKYO — Astronomers have peered back to when the universe was barely 400 million years old and found a galaxy unlike the orderly spirals of today. Nicknamed "Misty Moons," it is forming its stars not in a smooth disc but in a handful of giant, dense clumps — structures that may be the ancestors of the globular clusters still orbiting galaxies like our own Milky Way. Reported on Friday, 6 November 2026, the discovery was made possible by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the magnifying power of a massive galaxy cluster sitting between us and the young galaxy.
Illustration: An artist's impression of Misty Moons, a distant clumpy galaxy magnified by the gravity of the foreground galaxy cluster MACS J0257.1-2325.
What Happened
A team led by Minami Nakane of the University of Tokyo has identified a strongly lensed, clumpy galaxy at redshift about 11 to 12, seen when the universe was roughly 370 million to 410 million years old. Misty Moons was found in JWST Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) images of the cluster MACS J0257.1-2325 in 10 colour filters, plus older Hubble images in three filters. The findings appeared in The Astrophysical Journal on 19 October 2026 and were reported by phys.org on Friday, 6 November 2026.
In the images, Misty Moons appeared as two blobs, ID1 and ID2 — two views of the same galaxy, bent and duplicated by the gravity of the foreground cluster. The images vanish at shorter wavelengths, a signature of a very distant object. The team built two independent lens models of the cluster, and both predicted five images of the galaxy. Two bright lensed images appear roughly 20 to 30 times brighter than without magnification. A third potential image was also found; the remaining two are too faint to detect.
The breakthrough came when the team looked inside those magnified images. Smoothing the images and subtracting the blur revealed four clumps in ID1 and three in ID2; once lensing was removed, both images showed the same structure, confirming the clumps are real. Each clump holds about 10 million solar masses of young, dust-poor stars aged 40 to 70 million years. Together they account for at least 80 percent of the galaxy's stellar mass, suggesting early star formation was concentrated in compact regions rather than spread across a galaxy.
The clumps resemble local nuclear star clusters and young massive clusters, and the team says they may be proto-globular clusters — young versions of the ancient balls of stars orbiting the Milky Way today. If so, Misty Moons offers a rare direct look at globular-cluster birth. One caveat: the central clumps are bright and compact enough that the team cannot exclude a contribution from an actively feeding supermassive black hole — some of the light, and possibly some inferred star formation, could come from accretion rather than stars.
Background
Seeing anything from the universe's first few hundred million years is hard. The first galaxies were small, faint and far away, and their light has spent more than 13 billion years reaching us, stretched by cosmic expansion into infrared wavelengths ground-based telescopes struggle to detect. Before JWST began science operations in 2022, astronomers had only a handful of credible candidates from this era. Since then, it has found many galaxies from when the universe was only a few hundred million years old — some surprisingly bright for their size, hinting at dense star clusters packed into tiny volumes.
Early star clusters tend to be low in heavy elements and extremely dense, in some cases about 1,000 times denser than young clusters nearby. Astronomers measure the cluster formation efficiency — the share of a galaxy's new stars ending up in bound clusters — and some studies link it to the star formation rate, so fast-forming early galaxies may have had high efficiency. Misty Moons now gives that idea its clearest test. Examining individual clusters in such a distant galaxy is normally impossible, because early galaxies are too small and far away to resolve — which is where gravitational lensing comes in: a massive cluster's gravity bends and magnifies a distant object's light like a giant natural magnifying glass, revealing hidden structure.
Illustration: How gravitational lensing bends light from a distant galaxy around a massive cluster, creating multiple magnified images.
Misty Moons was found in data from the VENUS survey (Vast Exploration for Nascent, Unexplored Sources), a large JWST Treasury programme mapping early galaxies through lensing. According to the European Space Agency, it received roughly 300 hours of observing time, led by Seiji Fujimoto of the University of Toronto and Dan Coe of the Space Telescope Science Institute, aiming to find hundreds of lensed galaxies from less than 500 million years after the Big Bang. The lens, MACS J0257.1-2325, is a massive collection of galaxies, hot gas and dark matter whose gravity bent Misty Moons' light into several paths on its 13-billion-year journey. Because both models predicted the same five images, the team could trust the reconstruction. The nickname nods to the galaxy's appearance: faint, misty blobs, doubled by the lens like moons in a haze.
Why It Matters
The most striking result is how much of this galaxy is clump. In galaxies around us today, most stars live in smooth discs or broad haloes, and clusters hold only a small fraction of stellar mass. In Misty Moons, the opposite appears true: at least 80 percent of its stellar mass sits in a handful of dense clumps, each holding around 10 million solar masses of young stars. Early star formation may therefore have been concentrated, bursty and clump-dominated, rather than the steady, spread-out process seen in most galaxies today.
The clumps also look familiar: their sizes and masses resemble local nuclear star clusters and young massive clusters, which is why the team suggests they may be proto-globular clusters. Globular clusters are among the oldest known objects: dense swarms of hundreds of thousands of stars, mostly over 10 billion years old. How they formed has long been a puzzle, since their birthplaces are gone. If the clumps in Misty Moons are young globular clusters caught forming, astronomers finally have a direct view of the process at the right cosmic time.
Comparing clumpiness across cosmic time supports that picture. "The comparisons of the clumpiness among the observed and simulated galaxies across cosmic time suggest that the galaxies at higher redshift tend to be more clumpy, which is consistent with the observations of many clumpy galaxies at z > 6," the team writes — the opposite of local dwarf galaxies, which are small and faint but comparatively smooth. The team concludes that "high-z clumpy galaxies are likely distinct from the local dwarf galaxies not only in their high SFR surface densities but also in their short, bursty star formation during the early formation phase of the galaxy." The numbers are extreme: its star formation density is 100 to 10,000 times higher than in local dwarfs, and the researchers say that high rate likely drives the clump-dominated mode.
Illustration: Dense young star clusters — possible proto-globular clusters — forming inside a galaxy in the early universe.
That matters for galaxy-formation models, which must now reproduce galaxies with most stellar mass locked in a few giant clumps within the first 400 million years; models producing only smooth, slowly assembling discs would be missing something important. The possible black hole contribution is a reminder of the uncertainty: if the brightest central clumps are powered partly by an actively feeding supermassive black hole, some inferred star formation would need revising downward — and such a black hole so early would itself be a major discovery.
It is also worth stating what this discovery is not: no new distance record is claimed. The news is not the redshift — it is the resolved internal structure. Thanks to 20- to 30-fold magnification, astronomers picked out individual clumps in a galaxy from the universe's first 400 million years and measured their masses, ages and share of its stars. That detail at such a distance is what makes the result stand out.
What Happens Next
Next comes confirmation and closer inspection. The redshift of about 11 to 12 is estimated from how the galaxy's light fades at shorter wavelengths; spectroscopy could pin down the distance and reveal the chemical fingerprints of its young stars. It could also settle the black hole question by searching for broad emission lines betraying gas spiralling into a supermassive black hole. If the central clumps prove purely stellar, the proto-globular-cluster case strengthens; if a black hole is found, Misty Moons becomes a case study in how the first black holes grew alongside the first star clusters.
More broadly, the VENUS survey is still in progress and should identify hundreds of lensed galaxies from the early universe, testing whether clump-dominated star formation was the rule or the exception in the first billion years. Other JWST programmes are also targeting lensing clusters, and the bright knots now found inside some lensed galaxies — some only a few light-years across, magnified hundreds of times — show how far the technique can go. For now, Misty Moons stands as a small, misty pair of blobs carrying an outsized message: less than half a billion years after the Big Bang, one galaxy was already building its stars in giant, dense clusters that may still shine today as globular clusters.
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FAQ
What is the Misty Moons galaxy?
Misty Moons is a galaxy at redshift about 11 to 12, seen as it was roughly 370 to 410 million years after the Big Bang. A team led by Minami Nakane of the University of Tokyo found it in JWST NIRCam images of the cluster MACS J0257.1-2325, with supporting Hubble images. Its light is magnified 20 to 30 times by the cluster's gravity, letting astronomers resolve dense star-forming clumps inside it. The nickname refers to its faint, misty appearance as two blobs.
How far back in time are we looking when we see Misty Moons?
Its light has travelled for more than 13 billion years, stretched by cosmic expansion into infrared wavelengths. A redshift of 11 to 12 means about 370 to 410 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was less than 3 percent of its current age of about 13.8 billion years.
What are the clumps inside Misty Moons, and why may they be proto-globular clusters?
After removing the lensing effects, the team found four clumps in one lensed image and three in the other, each holding about 10 million solar masses of young, dust-poor stars aged 40 to 70 million years. Their sizes and masses resemble local nuclear star clusters and young massive clusters, and since globular clusters are ancient, dense balls of stars that must have formed in the early universe, these clumps — holding at least 80 percent of the galaxy's stars — are plausible candidates for globular clusters caught forming.
Could a black hole be involved in Misty Moons?
Possibly: the central clumps are bright and compact enough that the team cannot exclude a contribution from an actively feeding supermassive black hole. If one is present, some of the light — and possibly some inferred star formation — could come from gas falling into the black hole rather than from stars. Spectroscopy is needed to test this. Either outcome matters: a purely stellar explanation supports the proto-globular-cluster picture, while a black hole would show supermassive black holes could grow very early.
Is Misty Moons the most distant galaxy ever found?
No — that is not the claim. The news is the galaxy's resolved structure, not a new distance record. Lensing magnified Misty Moons 20 to 30 times, letting astronomers pick out individual star-forming clumps inside a galaxy from the universe's first 400 million years and measure their masses, ages and share of its stars — a detailed look at early star formation, not a race for the highest redshift.
Sources
- Shreejaya Karantha, "A galaxy nicknamed Misty Moons offers a glimpse of early star formation," phys.org, 6 November 2026. https://phys.org/news/2026-11-galaxy-nicknamed-misty-moons-glimpse.html
- Minami Nakane et al., "VENUS: A Strongly Lensed Clumpy Galaxy at z ~ 11–12 Behind the Galaxy Cluster MACS J0257.1-2325," The Astrophysical Journal, 19 October 2026. DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ae8d09
- European Space Agency / Webb, NASA & CSA, "JWST uses Einstein's prediction to probe the farthest reaches of the universe," Picture of the Month potm2606a, 3 July 2026.
- European Space Agency / Webb, NASA & CSA, "Galaxies in a cosmic house of mirrors" (MACS J0454.1-0300), Picture of the Month, 30 September 2026.
- Live Science, "JWST uses Einstein prediction to probe farthest reaches," 19 July 2026.
- NASA, James Webb Space Telescope, webb.nasa.gov, accessed 7 November 2026.
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