Webb reveals massive star clusters escape birth clouds 40% faster than expected

For generations, astronomers assumed that greater mass demanded greater time — that the heaviest star clusters would labor longest to escape the gas and dust of their own creation. Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, trained on nearly 9,000 young clusters across four nearby galaxies, have quietly overturned that intuition: the most massive clusters break free in roughly 5 million years, while their lighter counterparts struggle for 7 to 8 million. The giants, it turns out, are sprinters — and the consequences of their speed ripple outward into the fate of planets, galaxies, and t