In the vast ledger of cosmic origins, a question has long persisted: do stars form by the same rules everywhere, or does each galaxy write its own version of the story? Using the James Webb Space Telescope to peer into the Small Magellanic Cloud — a dwarf galaxy orbiting our own at 200,000 light-years — astronomers have found that roughly 14 percent of its stars travel in binary pairs, a proportion strikingly similar to that of the Milky Way despite the two galaxies' profoundly different histories and compositions. The finding suggests that the density of a stellar environment, more than its c