Tag Archives: JWST

Cosmic dust particles that give birth to planets around young stars have for the first time been found forming — the James Webb Space Telescope has witnessed the creation of these tiny planetary building blocks around a dead star. “This discovery is a big step forward in understanding how the basic materials of planets come together,” Mikako Matsuura of Cardiff …

A new discovery has just brought the total number of Uranus’s known moons to 29. In the space close to the icy planet, outside its ephemeral rings, JWST snapped a tiny object that no one had ever seen before, not even in data from the Voyager 2 probe that flew past Uranus at a close distance in 1986. It’s probably …

When global events set our minds to wondering if humanity has what it takes to persist, it’s natural to wonder about other worlds, other life, other intelligent species, and if those others might be better suited to survive whatever Great Filters they face. Those are fanciful thoughts, but there’s an underpinning of nuts-and-bolts thinking to them. It starts with identifying …

There’s bad news for our hopes of habitable planets existing around TRAPPIST-1, with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) finding no evidence for an Earth-like atmosphere on a third world orbiting the red dwarf. However, that still leaves four other planets in orbit around TRAPPIST-1 that could be habitable, with at least two or three of them in what is …

There might be a huge planet lurking near one of the closest stars to Earth. NASA‘s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has imaged a possible planet near Alpha Centauri A, a sun-like star that forms part of the triplet Alpha Centauri star group. The mini-cluster is just four light-years from Earth and is a rich ground for astronomers to learn …

This splash of paint on the canvas of space is the planetary nebula NGC 6072, the dying embers of a ruined star that has reached the end of its sun-like life. Cocooned inside the nebula, within its own ejected outer layers, the fading star is undergoing a transformation into a white dwarf. As the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows …

Astrophysicists don’t know if direct-collapse black holes are real. They were hypothesized to explain how the Universe could contain supermassive black holes (SMBH) so early. They don’t require a stellar progenitor, nor do they require hierarchical merging. Instead, they collapse due to instability in a gas cloud, much like stars do. Recently, astronomers working with images from the COSMOS-Web survey, …

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered an oddball galaxy, dubbed the Infinity Galaxy, that could be host to a “direct collapse black hole.” That is, a black hole originally created directly from a vast cloud of collapsing gas and dust rather than a dying star. The Infinity Galaxy gets its name from the fact that its …