Astronomers find bizarre 'Cosmic Grapes' galaxy in the early universe. Here's why that's a big deal.

Swirls of purple light surround a cluster of glowing purple spheres against a dark background

An artist’s impression of the Cosmic Grapes galaxy, composed of at least 15 massive star forming clumps. (Image credit: NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/B.Saxton)

A distant galaxy appears to have more than a dozen tightly packed star-forming clumps arranged like a bunch of grapes — far more than astronomers thought possible in a galaxy from the early universe.

The galaxy, nicknamed "Cosmic Grapes," is believed to have formed just 930 million years after the Big Bang. A new study has revealed that the galaxy has at least 15 massive star-forming clumps in its rotating disk, forming what appears to be a bunch of bright purple grapes in space.

"This object is known as one of the most strongly gravitationally lensed distant galaxies ever discovered," study lead author Seiji Fujimoto, said in a statement from the University of Texas at Austin's (UT Austin) McDonald Observatory.

"Thanks to this powerful natural magnification, combined with observations from some of the world's most advanced telescopes, we had a unique opportunity to study the internal structure of a distant galaxy at unprecedented sensitivity and resolution," added Fujimoto, who started the research while at UT Austin but is now at the University of Toronto.

The researchers collected more than 100 hours of telescope observations to study the primordial Cosmic Grapes galaxy. Earlier Hubble Space Telescope images of the object suggested a smooth, rotating disk, but the powerful resolution of ALMA and JWST revealed something juicier — the most detailed view yet of the galaxy's inner structure and massive clumps of dense gas primed for star formation.

A cluster of purple and white glowing stars with a pullout showing some of this light be stretched and warped. — Near-infrared images taken by JWST of the galaxy cluster “RXCJ0600-2007,” which causes a powerful gravitational lensing effect. Unprecedented high-resolution observations unveiled the structure of a distant galaxy in the early universe — composed of more than 15 compact star-forming clumps arranged like a “bunch of grapes” (zoom-in panel). (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/Fujimoto et al.)

"Our observations reveal that some early galaxies' young starlight is dominated by several massive, dense, compact clumps rather than one smooth distribution of stars," study co-author Mike Boylan-Kolchin, an astronomy professor at UT Austin, said in the same statement.