Astronomers have long studied dense collections of stars known as globular clusters scattered throughout the Milky Way. Most appear to have formed in one quick burst early on and then evolved quietly for billions of years. One object in the galaxy’s crowded central bulge always stood out a bit, though. New data has now shown why. Observations collected by the James Webb Space Telescope, working alongside archival records from the Hubble Space Telescope, have established that Terzan 5 contains not one but four distinct generations of stars. This discovery turns the object from a standard cluster into something researchers now call a bulge fossil fragment.
