Just 800 million years after the Big Bang, the James Webb Space Telescope, working with Hubble, has spotted something astronomers thought they’d almost never see: five galaxies colliding at once.

Galaxy mergers usually happen in pairs, but systems with multiple galaxies merging are extremely rare — less than 1% of all mergers. Finding one so early in the Universe is a cosmic jackpot.

This system, nicknamed the “JWST Quintet,” shows galaxies bound together by a huge shared halo of gas and the same redshift, proving they are physically interacting. The galaxies are incredibly close — only about 43 to 60 thousand light-years apart — meaning they will eventually fuse into one giant galaxy.

The discovery is especially striking because this ancient quintet looks a lot like Stephan’s Quintet, a famous group of galaxies near us. But unlike Stephan’s, the JWST Quintet is still young, bursting with star formation at a surprisingly high rate for such an early era.

Astronomers estimate the system’s total stellar mass at around 10 billion Suns. In the next billion years, it may evolve into a massive, quiet galaxy — unless supermassive black holes inside it shut down star formation even sooner.

This find doesn’t just reveal a spectacular moment frozen in time — it opens a new window into how the very first galaxies grew and collided in the infant Universe.