January 6, 2025, 1:43 PM 1:00 The discovery contrasts with earlier findings, which predominantly identified blue supergiants, which are among the brightest stars in the night sky, according to the Center for Astrophysics. In the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, such as the Andromeda Galaxy, astronomers can observe stars one by one. But for galaxies billions of light-years away, the stars appear blended together due to the distance. "To us, galaxies that are very far away usually look like a diffuse, fuzzy blob," lead author Yoshinobu Fudamoto, an assistant professor at Chiba University in Japan, said in a statement. Gravitational Lensing Diagram. This diagram illustrates how rays of light from a distant galaxy or star can be bent by the gravity of an intervening galaxy cluster. As a result, an observer on Earth sees the distant object appear brighter than it would look if it weren't gravitationally lensed. NASA, ESA, Ann Feild (STScI), Frank Summers (STScI) The Center for Astrophysics likened the chances of finding individual stars halfway across the observable universe to "raising a pair of binoculars at the moon in hopes of making out individual grains of dust inside its craters." The discovery came by happenstance, as the astronomers were looking for a background galaxy but instead found the individual stars, according to Fengwu Sun, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Astrophysics and co-author of the study. "This groundbreaking discovery demonstrates, for the first time, that studying large numbers of individual stars in a distant galaxy is possible," Sun said. "We now have the capability to resolve stars that were previously outside of our capability." MORE: There was once an ancient ocean filled with magma on the moon, scientists say Launched on Dec. 25, 2021, the Webb telescope orbits the sun about 1 million miles from Earth and gathers data to help astronomers study every phase of the history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life, according to NASA.