'Christmas lights' galaxy reveals how Universe formed

Prof Heymans, Scotland’s Astronomer Royal, who is independent of the research team, described the discovery as “gorgeous, scientifically important and extremely festive”.

“I find it amazing that humans have built a telescope that allows us to peer so far back in time and that we can see these very nascent phases of the galaxy in such a beautifully festive way.”

The star clusters are of different colours because they are at different stages in their formation, according to Dr Mowla.

“It is so beautiful because the early life of a galaxy is extremely active," she said.

"There is so much happening, there are new stars being born, there are massive stars dying, there is a lot of gas and dust around it and there is nitrogen and oxygen and because of the state they are in, you have these lovely colours.

“We are able to tell something about the ages of each cluster, the composition of their elements and the temperatures at which they formed.”

When Dr Mowla came across the galaxy, she had never seen clumps of stars in such vivid and varying colours. It led her to believe that there was something different about this system, so she checked how far away it was.

To her surprise it turned out to be more than 13 billion light years away.

The light from Firefly Sparkle is from not long after the creation of the Universe and so has taken more than 13 billion years to reach us. It is so small and so far away that not even JWST would have been able to see it, were it not for an extremely lucky cosmic coincidence.