A natural magnifying glass has sharpened images captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, revealing a distant galaxy that contradicts existing theories about early star formation. By pairing Hubble with a massive galaxy cluster, scientists captured images 10 times sharper than the space telescope could snap on its own. The resulting images reveal star-forming knots of newborn stars only 200 to 300 light-years across, in a galaxy that formed only 2.7 billion years after the Big Bang. Previous theories suggested that star-forming regions in the early universe were much larger — at least 3,000 light-years across. "There are star-forming knots as far down in size as we can see," Traci Johnson, a doctoral student in astronomy at the University of Michigan, said in a statement. Johnson is the lead author on two of the three research papers describing Hubble's new results, which were published July 6 in the The Astrophysical Journal and the The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Fireworks