Content tagged "JWST".
18 items (18 articles, 0 stories)
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.