Content tagged "JWST".
34 items (34 articles, 0 stories)
Deep inside Neptune's moon system, a crowd of small moons looks nothing like the giant Triton orbiting far outside. JWST infrared data shows they're darker and less icy than expected — the fingerprint of moons that were smashed apart and reassembled, twice over.
JWST has spotted the 'JWST Quintet' -- at least five galaxies merging just 800 million years after the Big Bang. Gas torn loose in the collision carried oxygen out beyond the galaxies themselves, catching the young universe in the act of distributing heavy elements.
JWST and the Keck Observatory watched clouds swell and dissolve above Saturn's largest moon, Titan. It doesn't rain water there, it rains methane. Over roughly 30 hours, researchers tracked those clouds and confirmed that a world with real seasons and weather exists well beyond Earth.
A planet bigger than Jupiter orbits close beside a white dwarf—the burned-out core of a dead star—at an average temperature of about -87°C. WD 1856+534 b is the coldest exoplanet ever directly imaged by JWST. SORABUMI explains how a planet survived a fate that should have destroyed it.
Just 0.55 light-years from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, an aging giant star called IRS 3 keeps producing water and silicate dust in one of the galaxy's harshest radiation zones. JWST caught the moment. A story of the universe quietly making things, from SORABUMI.
SORABUMI explains: JWST peered into the atmosphere of exoplanet PSR J2322-2650b and found neither water nor methane, but bare molecular carbon. It's the first detection of its kind among roughly 150 exoplanets studied, and current planet-formation models can't account for what's inside.
Voyager 2 caught Neptune's faint rings up close in 1989, and they've barely been visible since. Now JWST, sitting roughly 2.8 billion miles away, has spotted them again in infrared — with Neptune itself fading into the dark and its rings and seven moons popping into view. SORABUMI explains how staying farther away actually helped.
We weigh galaxies by their light, but light comes almost entirely from a handful of massive stars. More than 70% of all stars, by number, are dim and smaller than the Sun. JWST observations now suggest early-universe galaxies could be 3 to 4 times heavier than we thought. SORABUMI explains.
Most exoplanets never show up in a photo. So how did JWST directly image a gas giant 7.6 times the mass of Jupiter, 12 light-years away? The answer comes down to three things: brightness contrast, distance, and temperature.
Newborn star clusters are wrapped in gas cocoons and invisible in optical light. A team led by Stockholm University combed through thousands of clusters with Hubble and JWST and found that massive clusters break free in about 5 million years, while lighter ones take 7 to 8 million — and the heavier ones are the first to light up their galaxy. SORABUMI explains.
When a possible sign of life turns up in an exoplanet's atmosphere, scientists don't celebrate right away. Until the chance of a fluke falls below roughly 1 in 3.5 million — the '5-sigma' threshold — and until they've finished doubting their own wishful thinking, it isn't a 'discovery' yet. SORABUMI explains the yardstick of scientific confidence and why researchers hold their excitement in check.
How can we tell whether a rocky planet dozens of light-years away has an atmosphere? For a few hours, as the planet crosses in front of its star, starlight grazes its air and comes out with a few colors missing. SORABUMI explains how transit spectroscopy reads that 'color fingerprint,' and why the clue shrinks to the thickness of an apple peel once you're talking about an Earth-sized world.
Astronomers just found a third planet, d, orbiting Beta Pictoris through direct imaging. But when they went back through old archives, it turned out the planet had already been photographed more than 11 years earlier. SORABUMI explains how a world 100 times fainter than its neighbor slipped past notice for so long.
JWST found a bar structure roughly 4.5 kpc (about 15,000 light-years) long in a galaxy at redshift z=5.102, seen just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. A well-formed bar is a sign of a mature galaxy — and this one grew up faster than expected. SORABUMI explains.
We picture black holes as cosmic vacuum cleaners, but the real problem is starvation: food has to come to them. JWST peered into the central 2,000 light-years (618 parsecs) of NGC 4696 and, for the first time, caught 100-million-degree gas condensing into threads that feed a rotating disk — a self-sustaining feeding loop.
In 2026, JWST confirmed that the galaxy cluster XLSSC 122, some 10.4 billion light-years away, is producing powerful gravitational lensing. SORABUMI explains how a foreground cluster's gravity bends and magnifies light from behind it, and why this densely packed cluster shouldn't have existed so soon.
Cosmic dust is the raw material of planets and our own bodies. In Sextans A, a primitive dwarf galaxy with just 3-7% of the Sun's heavy elements, JWST spotted stars making dust out of almost nothing but iron. SORABUMI unpacks the surprising answer to how the early universe managed to make dust at all.
JWST tracked the scorching gas giant WASP-121b for a full orbit and found something strange: the escaping atmosphere trails behind the planet, but also stretches out ahead of it. SORABUMI breaks down what a complete-orbit observation of atmospheric loss, 858 light-years away, actually revealed.
JWST kept finding strange red dots in the early universe, dubbed 'Little Red Dots.' In June 2026, a spectrum of one such object, GLIMPSE-17775, revealed over 40 emission lines and 16 iron absorption lines — proof it isn't a galaxy at all, but a black hole wrapped in gas. From space media outlet SORABUMI.
SORABUMI explains: 190 light-years away, in the TOI-1130 system, a Neptune-sized planet survives on a 4-day orbit even closer to the star than a hot Jupiter that should have cleared everything out. JWST read the atmosphere and found a story of two worlds that migrated inward together.
About 200,000 light-years away, in a corner of the Small Magellanic Cloud, NGC 602 is a star cluster where the death of massive stars and the birth of new ones play out in the same place, at the same time. What JWST and Chandra captured together looks like a cosmic wreath — and it doubles as a window into what the early universe was like.
JWST detected methane and an unusually high abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. The chemical ratios look nothing like those of comets born in our own solar system. This is the first time we have directly measured the composition of material made around another star.
A red dwarf barely 40% the mass of our Sun is orbited by a gas giant nearly the size of Jupiter. TOI-5205b shouldn't exist according to planet formation theory — and when JWST peered at its atmosphere, the surprises kept coming.
On WASP-94Ab, a giant planet 690 light-years away, silicate clouds made of vaporized rock form every morning and vanish by dusk. JWST's first direct observation of this rock-cloud cycle — and why it changes everything we know about planetary atmospheres.
At the center of two dwarf galaxies named Perias and Nereus, astronomers found black holes that account for up to 60% of the galaxy's stellar mass — a figure that should be 0.1 to 0.5%. JWST is rewriting what we thought we knew about the early universe.
Galaxies don't float around randomly. They line up along thread-like structures called filaments, tied together at knots called galaxy clusters. JWST's COSMOS-Web survey has now produced the highest-resolution map of this cosmic web ever made, reaching back to just one billion years after the Big Bang.
A massive galaxy with barely any rotation has been discovered just 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang. JWST's observations are quietly dismantling the assumption that young galaxies always spin.
Just 300 million years after the Big Bang, a galaxy rivaling the Milky Way in 'maturity' already existed. JADES-GS-z14-0, discovered by JWST, is challenging the foundations of cosmology.
JWST, SOHO, Euclid — they all live at something called a Lagrange point, a gravitationally sweet spot 1.5 million km from Earth. Why send expensive telescopes all the way out there? Here's how the solar system's cosmic parking lots actually work.
A spiral galaxy nearly identical to the Milky Way was found just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. Here's what JWST's stunning discovery means for galaxy formation — and why the old theories are struggling to keep up.
JWST detected a thick atmosphere on TOI-561 b, a scorching rocky planet orbiting its star in just 11 hours. Here's why an atmosphere can survive in that environment — and why the discovery changes everything about how we study exoplanets.
The James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope observed Saturn at nearly the same time. What infrared and visible light each uncovered tells us something profound about how planets are built.
When a galaxy plunges into a cluster, superheated gas blasts it into something that looks eerily like a jellyfish. Here's how ram pressure stripping works — and what JWST found 8.5 billion years back.
Benzene has been found in space. Amino acids and nucleobases hitchhike on comets. Organic molecules are everywhere. So why does life seem to exist only on Earth? JWST's latest observations are forcing us to rethink the enormous gap between raw ingredients and living things.