Astronomers have spotted something truly extraordinary in the early universe—a galaxy made up of clumps of stars that look like a bunch of cosmic grapes.
This galaxy, seen as it was just 900 million years after the Big Bang, is helping scientists rethink how galaxies formed in the early days of the cosmos.
Nicknamed the “Cosmic Grapes,” the galaxy appears to be made of at least 15 massive star-forming clumps packed into a single rotating disk.
That’s far more than scientists expected to find in a galaxy so young.
According to current theories, galaxies from this time should be much smoother and less clumpy. But the Cosmic Grapes are defying those expectations.
This stunning discovery was made using two of the most powerful tools in astronomy: the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
These observatories teamed up to focus over 100 hours of telescope time on this one galaxy, which was made even more visible thanks to a lucky break—its light was magnified by a foreground galaxy cluster acting like a natural zoom lens, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.
While older Hubble images made this galaxy appear smooth and simple, the sharper vision of JWST and ALMA told a different story.
They revealed that what looked like a plain, rotating disk is actually bursting with tightly packed star-forming clumps. These clumps are only about 30 light-years across, but there are so many of them that they make the galaxy look like a cluster of grapes spinning in space.
What’s truly surprising is that this galaxy isn’t unusual in any other way. Its size, mass, star-forming activity, and chemical makeup all fall within the “main sequence” of typical galaxies.
That means it’s likely not an oddball, but rather a representative example of what many young galaxies might look like—if we had the tools to see them clearly.
This finding challenges our current computer models, which can’t explain how so many clumps could form in a rotating galaxy so early in the universe’s history. It suggests that scientists may need to rethink how galaxies grow, and how stars form and shape them over time.
The Cosmic Grapes give us a rare and exciting glimpse into the hidden structures of the early universe.
With more powerful telescopes and future studies, astronomers hope to find out whether these clumpy galaxies were common—and what they can teach us about the universe’s first billion years.
Source: KSR.
