Webb telescope maps 9,000 star clusters, revealing how massive ones escape birth clouds in 5 million years

Across the vast nurseries where galaxies are born, humanity's most powerful eye has been watching — and counting. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has catalogued nearly 9,000 young star clusters, discovering that the most massive among them shed their birth clouds in just 5 million years, far sooner than prevailing theory had imagined. This single measurement — a cosmic clock ticking faster than expected — quietly unsettles decades of assumptions about how galaxies assemble themselves, reminding us that the universe continues to revise our understanding of its own origins.