Astronomers investigate a far-distant galaxy that may be surrounded by some of the very first stars.
The picture, called SMACS 0723, is an example of what's referred to as a gravitational lens. It shows a set of massive foreground galaxies that have magnified and bent the light coming from galaxies in the background.
Only with James Webb's extraordinary power are these dots resolvable. You couldn't see them with that other great observatory, Hubble, for instance. The team's contention is that the sparkles are globular clusters just like the globulars seen around our Milky Way today, except we're seeing these dots much, much earlier in the history of the Universe.
"They could have formed in a burst at what we call 'cosmic noon', at the peak of star formation at about 10 billion years ago. But their colour isn't right. For something to be relatively young, it has to be bluer, and what we're finding is that they're much redder than we expected them to be, which means they must be older, even at that very early time," she told BBC News.