The Hubble Telescope recently used these stars to determine the distance to a galaxy in the Virgo cluster, 56 million light-years from Earth. The Cepheid variable stars ... detected but never before ...

By reconstructing stellar orbits using real Milky Way stars with accurately determined parameters, the team quantified the galaxy's mass-weighted chemical abundances and age structure. This ...

The galaxy is estimated to have formed 100-400 million years before its evolutionary stage that was observed by Webb, the most capable space telescope ever deployed. "The Milky Way began forming ...