The Sullivan post-doctoral fellow Alessandro Della Croce along with IU Professor Enrico Vesperini and collaborators recently published a work on the link between high-redshift clumps and Local globular clusters (GCs). Their work shows that the stellar clumps observed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can be the progenitor of Local GCs.
In recent years, JWST has discovered several relatively massive and dense stellar structures (referred to as clumps) at high redshift thanks to the magnification of gravitational lensing. Some of these systems formed very early, about 12-13 billion years ago. Such properties suggest that these clumps might be the progenitors of globular clusters (GCs) in the local Universe. However, it is unclear whether after several billion years of dynamical evolution clumps can evolve into GC-like systems.
They explored this possibility using a set of numerical simulations of the evolution of massive and compact stellar systems. Their simulations account for the evolution of single and binary stars, the effects of stellar encounters, and the presence of the external cosmological tidal field. In addition, they studied the evolution of single (SP) and multiple stellar-population (MP) systems. Multiple stellar populations are indeed ubiquitous in Local GCs.
They found that SP clusters dissolve during their early evolution and might survive only if they were extremely compact and massive initially. On the other hand, the internal primordial substructure envisioned by MP scenarios allows clusters to survive for a Hubble time and evolve into systems with properties remarkably similar to Local GCs. Finally, they studied the role of stellar-mass black hole retention, finding that the presence of a massive population of black holes enhances the early disruption.
Their work presents the possible evolutionary pathway of high-redshift clumps observed by JWST into local GCs. The article has been published as a Letter in the Astronomy & Astrophysics Journal. It is available at https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2026/07/aa60579-26/aa60579-26.html
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