Located about 35 light-years from Earth, L 98-59 is a cool, dim red dwarf star already known to host a compact system of small, rocky planets. The latest discovery, led by researchers at the Université de Montréal's Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets, confirms the presence of L 98-59 f, a super-Earth with a minimum mass 2.8 times that of our planet.

The newly discovered exoplanet follows an almost perfectly circular 23-Earth-day orbit around its star. The world receives roughly the same amount of stellar energy as Earth, placing it in the star's habitable zone — a range of distances where liquid water could exist under suitable atmospheric conditions, according to a statement from the university.

"Finding a temperate planet in such a compact system makes this discovery particularly exciting," Charles Cadieux, a postdoctoral researcher at the university and lead author of the study, said in the statement. "It highlights the remarkable diversity of exoplanetary systems and strengthens the case for studying potentially habitable worlds around low-mass stars."

L 98-59 f was discovered by reanalyzing data from the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) and ESPRESSO (Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations) spectrographs. Since the exoplanet doesn't transit, or pass in front of, its host star from our perspective, astronomers spotted it by tracking subtle shifts in the star's motion that are caused by the planet's gravitational pull.

By combining the spectrograph data with observations from NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — and using advanced techniques to filter out stellar noise — researchers were able to determine the size, mass and key properties of all five planets.

The study shows that L 98-59 b, the innermost planet, is just 84% the size of Earth and half its mass, making it one of the smallest exoplanets measured. Tidal forces may drive volcanic activity on the system's two innermost planets, while the third's unusually low density suggests it could be a water-rich world unlike any in our solar system. This diversity offers a rare opportunity to investigate the formation and evolution of planetary systems beyond our own, team members said.

"These new results paint the most complete picture we've ever had of the fascinating L 98-59 system," Cadieux said. "It's a powerful demonstration of what we can achieve by combining data from space telescopes and high-precision instruments on Earth, and it gives us key targets for future atmospheric studies with the James Webb Space Telescope."

Because L 98-59 is small and nearby, its planets are especially well-suited for follow-up atmospheric studies. If L 98-59 f has an atmosphere, telescopes like JWST may be able to detect water vapor, carbon dioxide — or even biosignatures.

The new study was published July 12 in the journal Earth and Planetary Astrophysics.

For decades, scientists pictured Europa's frozen surface as a still, silent shell. But the new observations reveal that it's actually a dynamic world that's far from frozen in time.

"We think that the surface is fairly porous and warm enough in some areas to allow the ice to recrystallize rapidly," Richard Cartwright, a spectroscopist at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory and lead author of the new study, said in a statement.

Perhaps even more exciting is what this surface activity reveals about Europa's subsurface ocean. The presence of geologic activity and ongoing cycling between the subsurface and surface make "chaos terrains" — highly disrupted regions where blocks of ice seem to have broken off, drifted and refrozen — especially valuable as potential windows into Europa's interior.

The study focused on two regions in Europa's southern hemisphere: Tara Regio and Powys Regio. Tara Regio, in particular, stands out as one of the moon's most intriguing areas. Observations from JWST detected crystalline ice both at the surface and deeper below — challenging previous assumptions about how ice is distributed on Europa.

Related: Explore Jupiter's icy ocean moon Europa in NASA virtual tour (photos)

By measuring the spectral properties of these "chaos" regions using remotely sensed data, scientists could gain valuable insight about Europa's chemistry as well as its potential for habitability, they explained in the paper, which was published May 28 in The Planetary Science Journal.

"Our data showed strong indications that what we are seeing must be sourced from the interior, perhaps from a subsurface ocean nearly 20 miles (30 kilometers) beneath Europa's thick icy shell," Ujjwal Raut, program manager at the Southwest Research Institute and co-author of the study, said in the statement.

Hidden chemistry

Raut and his team conducted laboratory experiments to study how water freezes on Europa, where the surface is constantly bombarded by charged particles from space. Unlike on Earth, where ice naturally forms a hexagonal crystal structure, the intense radiation on Europa disrupts the ice's structure, causing it to become what's known as amorphous ice — a disordered, noncrystalline form.

The experiments played a crucial role in demonstrating how the ice changes over time. By studying how the ice transforms between different states, scientists can learn more about the moon's surface dynamics. When combined with fresh data from JWST, these findings add to a growing body of evidence showing that a vast, hidden liquid ocean lies beneath Europa's icy shell.

"In this same region […] we see a lot of other unusual things, including the best evidence for sodium chloride, like table salt, probably originating from its interior ocean," Cartwright said. "We also see some of the strongest evidence for CO₂ and hydrogen peroxide on Europa. The chemistry in this location is really strange and exciting."

These regions, marked by fractured surface features, may point to geologic activity pushing material up from beneath Europa's icy shell.

JWST's NIRSpec instrument is especially well suited for studying Europa's surface because it can detect key chemical signatures across a wide range of infrared wavelengths. This includes features associated with crystalline water ice and a specific form of carbon dioxide called ¹³CO₂, which are important for understanding the moon's geologic and chemical processes.

NIRSpec can measure these features all at once while also creating detailed maps that show how these materials are distributed across Europa's surface. Its high sensitivity and ability to collect both spectral and spatial data make it an ideal tool for uncovering clues about what lies beneath Europa's icy crust.

The team detected higher levels of carbon dioxide in these areas than in surrounding regions. They concluded that it likely originates from the subsurface ocean rather than from external sources like meteorites, which would have resulted in a more even distribution.

Moreover, carbon dioxide is unstable under Europa's intense radiation environment, suggesting that these deposits are relatively recent and tied to ongoing geological processes. "The evidence for a liquid ocean underneath Europa's icy shell is mounting, which makes this so exciting as we continue to learn more," Raut said.

Another intriguing finding was the presence of carbon-13, an isotope of carbon. "Where is this ¹³CO₂ coming from? It's hard to explain, but every road leads back to an internal origin, which is in line with other hypotheses about the origin of ¹²CO₂ detected in Tara Regio," Cartwright said.

This study arrives as NASA's Europa Clipper mission is currently en route to the Jovian moon, with an expected arrival in April 2030. The spacecraft will perform dozens of flybys, with each one bringing it closer to Europa's surface to gather critical data about the ocean hidden beneath the moon's icy crust.

The Infinity Galaxy gets its name from the fact that its shape resembles an infinity symbol (a sideways 8) with two red lobes or "nuclei." This shape is thought to have arisen because the Infinity Galaxy was formed as two disk galaxies engaged in a head-on collision.

What makes this highly unusual is the fact that this black hole sits between the two colliding galaxies in a vast cloud of gas, rather than in either respective nucleus. From its perch between these galaxies, the black hole now feeds greedily on that gas, but researchers think that same cloud also once birthed it. That would make this the first observational evidence of the direct collapse pathway of black hole birth.

The researchers behind these findings uncovered the Infinity Galaxy while examining images from the JWST's 255-hour treasury COSMOS-Web survey. In addition to the suspected direct collapse black hole that sits between the colliding galaxies, the team found that each nucleus of those galaxies also contains a supermassive black hole!

"Everything is unusual about this galaxy. Not only does it look very strange, but it also has this supermassive black hole that's pulling a lot of material in," team leader and Yale University researcher Pieter van Dokkum said in a statement. "The biggest surprise of all was that the black hole was not located inside either of the two nuclei but in the middle.

"We asked ourselves: How can we make sense of this?"

van Dokkum explained that finding a black hole not in the nucleus of a massive galaxy isn't, in itself, unusual. What is strange is the question of how that black hole got there.

"It likely didn't just arrive there, but instead it formed there," van Dokkum said. "And pretty recently. In other words, we think we're witnessing the birth of a supermassive black hole – something that has never been seen before."

This discovery could solve an intriguing mystery regarding the observation of supermassive black holes with masses millions or billions of times that of the sun, less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang.

Black holes could skip stellar deaths and supernovas

Since it began operating three years ago, the JWST has delivered something of a conundrum to cosmologists; observations that show supermassive black holes seem common as early as 500 million years after the Big Bang.

That's a problem because it was previously proposed that supermassive black holes form through successive mergers of smaller black holes. However, beginning this process with so-called stellar-mass black holes would require waiting for the first generation of stars to form, live their lives, then collapse in supernova explosions. The resulting black holes would have to undergo a series of mergers and periods of intense feeding upon interstellar gas and dust.

This process would take at least a billion years to "grow" a black hole to supermassive status. Thus, seeing a multitude of supermassive black holes before the universe was 1 billion years old is problematic.

That is, unless these bodies got a head start by skipping the stellar life and birth stage of this process.

"How supermassive black holes formed is a long-standing question. There are two main theories, called 'light seeds' and 'heavy seeds.' In the light seed theory, you start with small black holes formed when a star's core collapses and the star explodes as a supernova," van Dokkum explained. "That might result in a black hole weighing up to about 1,000 suns. You form a lot of them in a small space, and they merge over time to become a much more massive black hole."

As mentioned above, the problem with that is the time this process would take and the JWST's discovery of incredibly massive black holes at early stages of our 13.8 billion-year-old universe.

Black holes could have heavy seeds

Alternatively, the heavy seed theory sees supermassive black hole growth kickstarted with a much larger black hole, maybe up to one million times the mass of the sun. This forms directly from the collapse of a large gas cloud.

"You immediately form a giant black hole, so it's much quicker. However, the problem with forming a black hole out of a gas cloud is that gas clouds like to form stars as they collapse rather than a black hole, so you have to find some way of preventing that. It's not clear that this direct-collapse process could work in practice," van Dokkum said. "By looking at the data from the Infinity Galaxy, we think we've pieced together a story of how this could have happened here."

The researchers suggest that as the two disk galaxies collided, a ring structure of stars, visible in the JWST image, was formed. During this collision, gas within these two galaxies would have been shocked and compressed. They think this compression may have been so extreme that it formed a "dense knot" in the gas, which then collapsed into a black hole.

As van Dokkum explained, there is a wealth of circumstantial evidence for this formation channel for the black hole in the Infinity Galaxy.

"We observe a large swath of ionized gas, specifically hydrogen that has been stripped of its electrons, that's right in the middle between the two nuclei, surrounding the supermassive black hole," he continued. "We also know that the black hole is actively growing – we see evidence of that in X-rays from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and radio from the Very Large Array. Nevertheless, the question is, did it form there?"

There are two possible explanations that don't involve a direct collapse black hole forming at the intersection of these merged galaxies.

"First, it could be a runaway black hole that got ejected from a galaxy and just happens to be passing through," van Dokkum said. "Second, it could be a black hole at the center of a third galaxy in the same location on the sky. If it were in a third galaxy, we would expect to see the surrounding galaxy unless it were a faint dwarf galaxy. However, dwarf galaxies don't tend to host giant black holes.

"If the black hole were a runaway, or if it were in an unrelated galaxy, we would expect it to have a very different velocity from the gas in the Infinity Galaxy."

To test this, the team intends to measure the velocity of the gas and the velocity of the black hole and compare them. Should those velocities be close, within around 30 miles per second (50 kilometers per second), then van Dokkum asserts that it will be hard to argue that the black hole is not formed from that gas.

"Our preliminary results are exciting. First, the presence of an extended distribution of ionized gas between the two nuclei is confirmed. Second, the black hole is beautifully in the middle of the velocity distribution of this surrounding gas, as expected if it formed there. This is the key result that we were after!" van Dokkum continued. "Third, as an unexpected bonus, it turns out that both galaxy nuclei also have an active supermassive black hole."

Though the team can't say definitively that they discovered a direct collapse black hole, they can state with confidence that this JWST data strengthens the case for this being a newborn black hole, while eliminating some of the counter-explanations to the direct collapse pathway.

"This system has three confirmed active black holes: two very massive ones in both of the galaxy nuclei, and the one in between them that might have formed there," van Dokkum said. "We will continue to pore through the data and investigate these possibilities."

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is celebrating three years of transformational science with a striking new image of the Cat's Paw Nebula — a vast nursery of stars located about 4,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius.

Released Thursday (July 10), the JWST's new image offers a dazzling close-up of a section of the nebula known for its distinctive, pawprint-like appearance thanks to large, circular structures that resemble a feline's "toe beans," the soft pads on the bottom of cats' paws.

The image is only the most recent demonstration of what the groundbreaking telescope can do, scientists say. "Three years into its mission, Webb continues to deliver on its design," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, who is the acting astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington D.C., said in a statement accompanying the image.

The nebula spans an estimated 80 to 90 light-years, and appears slightly larger than the full moon in our sky. The image highlights JWST's key ability to observe objects in infrared light, allowing it to see through dense clouds that otherwise obscure chaotic stellar nurseries.

"It's the cat's meow," NASA wrote in the statement accompanying the release. JWST "has 'clawed' back the thick, dusty layers of a section within the Cat's Paw Nebula."

The image captures intricate, never-before-seen details of the Cat's Paw Nebula, including how massive stars within it carve cavities in the surrounding gas and dust. These stars, though short-lived, dramatically reshape their environments by temporarily lighting up their surroundings before halting further star formation, according to the NASA statement.

Among the most eye-catching features is a red-orange oval near the top right. This quiet zone, sparse in background stars, appears to be a dense region in the early stages of star formation. Within it, veiled stars are beginning to shine, including one whose energetic outflow has produced a visible shockwave caused by high-speed ejection of gas and dust, which the Webb team says suggests intense stellar activity from a still-embedded star.

At the top center of the image is a structure nicknamed the Opera House, recognizable by its tiered, circular layers of orange-brown dust. Just below it, a bright yellow star has sculpted a compact shell around itself, though it hasn't managed to blow away all the surrounding gas.

The source of the nebula's cloudy blue glow may lie at the bottom of the structure, where gas is illuminated by bright yellow stars, or perhaps a still-hidden source behind dense dust, according to the NASA statement.

To the immediate left of the Opera House is a tuning-fork-shaped dark region with few visible stars, an indicator that thick dust filaments may be concealing stars still in formation.

Toward the image's center, fiery red clumps embedded in brown dust hint at sites of massive, ongoing star formation. One striking blue-white star in the lower-left "toe bean" appears particularly well-defined, having cleared the space around it through powerful radiation.

Dense filaments nearby, still resisting the harsh radiation-filled environment, may signal future birthplaces of stars, according to the statement.

Since beginning science operations in July 2022, JWST has transformed our understanding of the universe, from spotting the earliest galaxies yet to probing exoplanets and cradles of newborn stars. The anniversary image continues JWST's legacy while setting the stage for the missions to come, the statement read.

"As it repeatedly breaks its own records, Webb is also uncovering unknowns for new generations of flagship missions to tackle," Domagal-Goldman said in the statement.

"The questions Webb has raised are just as exciting as the answers it's giving us."

The investigation could help reveal where vast amounts of cosmic dust come from before they go on to form the building blocks of new stars.

The stars investigated by this team of researchers are aging stellar bodies known as Wolf-Rayet stars. These massive stars have burned through their hydrogen and are on the verge of supernova explosions that will disperse the elements forged within them throughout the cosmos. These elements are eventually incorporated into new stars, meaning Wolf-Rayet stars represent a key stage in the cycle of stellar life and death.

"Wolf-Rayet stars are essentially highly evolved massive stars that don't show hydrogen at all," team leader and Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University professor Noel Richardson said in a statement. "They've lost their hydrogen in the outer part of the star, fusing helium in their core, which means they are nearing the end of their life cycle."

As Wolf-Rayet stars die, they emit powerful stellar winds that, in the presence of another nearby massive star, condense to form shells of carbon dust.

However, until now, these shells had only been observed around the Wolf-Rayet star WR-140.

Richardson and colleagues set about observing four other Wolf-Rayet star systems, around each of which they found several dust shells similar to that of WR-140.

"Not only did we find that the dust in these systems is long-lived and making its way out into space, we discovered this is not unique to just one system," Richardson said.

Expanding observations of Wolf-Rayet stars to five systems rather than just one is an important step in understanding these aging stars.

"It confirmed that we are seeing the same pattern of surviving dust shells that we did around WR-140 in other systems," team member and NOIRLab astronomer Ryan Lau said. "These observations show that the dust produced by Wolf-Rayet stars can survive the harsh stellar environment."

The fact that this carbon dust can potentially survive for centuries could change how we think about the building blocks of new stars.

"Where does this dust go?" Lau asked. "We want to learn what exactly the chemistry of this dust is. To do that, we need to take spectra to identify specific grain composition — the physical properties — to get an idea of the chemical contribution to the interstellar medium."

The team's research was published on Monday (July 7) in The Astrophysical Journal.

The observations could indicate that supermassive black holes in the early universe grew from so-called primordial black holes, created by density fluctuations just after the Big Bang.

This theory has an advantage over supermassive black hole formation ideas that need time for the first generation of massive stars to form and die, and then for the black holes they birth to merge and feed on copious amounts of gas and dust.

The supermassive black hole observed by JWST is A2744-QSO1 (QSO1), which has a mass of around 10 million times that of the sun, equivalent to 10% of the total mass of its host galaxy.

Supermassive black holes seen in the local universe and thus during later cosmic epochs have masses as low as 0.005% that of their galactic hosts. But the host galaxy of QSO1 isn't just remarkably diminutive.

This galaxy, seen as it was 13 billion years ago, is also poor in metals, the name that astronomers give to elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. This indicates it has experienced very few stars exploding in supernovas and dispersing metals forged during their lifetimes.

"QSO1 is extremely poor in oxygen abundance, less than 1% of the solar value, and makes it one of the most chemically unevolved systems found in the early universe," research team member Roberto Maiolino, an astrophysicist at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England, told Space.com.

"As oxygen is quickly produced by the first generations of stars, the extremely low chemical enrichment indicates that the host galaxy of this black hole must be fairly unevolved," Maiolino added. "This is a remarkable finding, as it is telling us that massive black holes can form and grow fairly big in the early universe without being accompanied by much star formation."

QSO1 can't have formed from mergers of many smaller black holes created when stars die in supernovas. The lack of metals indicates that widespread stellar death hadn't happened in this galaxy at the time that JWST saw it.

This could help solve the mystery of how supermassive black holes grew so fast in the early universe, by favoring mechanisms that skip dying stars as cosmic middlemen.

Black holes and 'heavy seeds'

Ever since JWST started making observations of the early universe, the powerful space telescope has presented cosmologists with a problem: the detection of supermassive black holes prior to 1 billion years after the Big Bang.

"The standard scenario is that supermassive black holes should originate from stellar remnants, black holes with masses of a few tens of solar masses, and then grow to very large masses by accreting gas from the surrounding medium," team member and University of Cambridge researcher Hannah Uebler explained to Space.com. "However, there is a theoretical limit at which black holes can accrete gas and grow."

Uebler explained that black holes are fed this meal of gas from flattened clouds that surround them, called accretion disks. The immense gravity of these central black holes generates huge amounts of friction in the accretion disk, which becomes very hot and radiates energy strongly, especially in ultraviolet wavelengths.

"The light emitted by the accretion disk exerts pressure on the incoming gas, hence counteracting the effect of gravity," Uebler said. "If radiation pressure exceeds the black hole’s gravitational pull on gas, that’s when accretion must (in theory) stop. This is the so-called Eddington limit."

What JWST seems to have found in the early universe, especially within the first billion years after the Big Bang, are black holes that are far too massive to have formed and grown via this scenario.

"Very simply, at such early epochs in the universe, there was not enough time to produce such monsters starting from small seeds and with a growth constrained by the Eddington limit," Uebler said.

Scientists have posited a few theories to explain how black holes could have reached supermassive status, with masses millions of times that of the sun, in the early cosmos.

"One possibility is that black holes were born big. This is typically the 'Direct Collapse Black Hole' scenario," Maiolino said. "Under some specific conditions, pristine massive clouds of gas may have collapsed directly to form an extremely massive protostar which would have then collapsed into a very massive black hole, possibly with a mass of 100,000 times the mass of the sun, which can then grow further via gas accretion."

Another possibility, Maiolino added, is that the cores of primeval galaxies were highly dense with stars, and the rapid merging of stars and stellar remnants may have produced intermediate-mass black holes several thousand times heftier than the sun.

"Yet, another possibility is that early black holes were 'reckless' and managed to exceed the Eddington limit," Maiolino said. "Even short, recurrent bursts of this 'super-Eddington accretion' can be very effective in rapidly growing the mass of black holes that were originally very small."

Maiolino explained that the above scenarios manage to explain QSO1 in extreme cases. However, in the majority of simulations and models involving these mechanisms, it's very difficult to reproduce the very high black hole mass, the very high black hole to galaxy mass ratio, and, crucially, the very low metallicity of QSO1 simultaneously.

"In the direct collapse scenario, the black hole should be located near an active region where stars have formed vigorously," Maiolino continued. "Gas from such active nearby regions must rapidly pollute also the surroundings of the newly formed black hole while it grows.

"The super-Eddington accretion scenario runs into similar problems. The large amounts of gas needed to boost its accretion must unavoidably also form a lot of stars, which rapidly enrich the surrounding medium with metals."

There is another scenario devised to account for the rapid growth of monster black holes that involves primordial black holes, which are hypothesized to have formed within the first second after the Big Bang.

"In this scenario, such putative primordial black holes would have been the very first structures formed in the universe, well before stars and galaxies," Maiolino said.

This scenario may well be a better fit for the team's JWST observations of QSO1.

Starting off small: Growth from primordial black holes

The team behind these observations of QSO1 with the JWST points out that the concept of primordial black holes is one that has grown in favor over the last four decades.

"Primordial black holes can emerge from the very early universe pretty much already very massive," Uebler said. "Additionally, theories predict that they should be very clustered; hence, they could be merging quickly and therefore grow rapidly even before gas accretion."

According to some theories, these primordial black holes would be the initial seeds around which galaxies subsequently form. The initial phases of accretion onto the black hole would be from pristine or nearly pristine gas, not enriched with metals.

Indeed, recently published research has also suggested the idea that supermassive black holes could have grown from black holes created shortly after the Big Bang.

"As first suggested in the 1960s, a population of primordial black holes may have formed even earlier than the first stars," Lewis Prole, the lead author of that separate research, told Space.com.

"The existence of primordial black holes would bypass the need for massive stars in the early universe, by acting as the initial seeds for the supermassive black holes observed with JWST," added Prole, a postdoctoral researcher at Maynooth University in Ireland. "Depending on the formation mass of primordial black holes, which is currently unknown, they can have different effects."

Prole and colleagues performed the first detailed simulations of the cosmos factoring in primordial black holes. They found that those with intermediate masses could implant themselves in halos containing dense gas and start growing early enough to achieve supermassive black hole status prior to the universe being 1 billion years old.

"Very large primordial black holes may already be massive enough to account for the observed supermassive black holes, while smaller primordial black holes would need to embed themselves into early galaxies and accrete up to the observed masses," Prole said.

Indeed, the new JWST observations of QSO1 could be the first observational evidence of this growth by primordial black holes. But there is a long way to go before this can be confirmed.

"It is important to note that the primordial black hole scenario also has caveats and does not perfectly reproduce the observations," Mailino said. "These issues should be explored with additional modeling and simulations."

In addition to better modeling, higher resolution observations could help researchers to better constrain the actual number of stars that are present in the surroundings of this black hole and, if detected, their properties.

"This kind of data would help to understand whether the black hole really formed unaccompanied by much star formation," Mailino said. "Ultimately, a definite proof of the primordial black hole scenario would come from detecting such massive black holes at even earlier times in the universe."

The team's research has been submitted to the journal Nature and appears as a preprint on the repository site arXiv.

The prefix "dark" here doesn't refer to the Dark Lord, but rather to dark matter, the mysterious stuff that accounts for 85% of the matter in the universe. This form of matter remains effectively invisible because it doesn't interact with light, but it does interact with gravity.

New research suggests that brown dwarfs, also known "failed stars," could act as gravitational traps for dark matter, forcing the exotic stuff to interact with itself. This releases energy, heating these failed stars, and turning them from brown dwarfs to dark dwarfs. And the more dark matter that dark dwarfs accumulate, the more energy these darkside stars would radiate.

If this idea is correct, and dark dwarfs do dwell at the heart of the Milky Way and other galaxies, where dark matter is most abundant, then it gives scientists a strong hint about what hypothetical undiscovered particles must make up this mysterious form of matter.

That's because only certain dark matter particles interact with each other and "self-annihilate," releasing energy. Arguably, the most favored example of such self-interacting particles are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs).

"Dark matter interacts gravitationally, so it could be captured by stars and accumulate inside them," team member Jeremy Sakstein of the University of Hawai‘i said in a statement. " If that happens, it might also interact with itself and annihilate, releasing energy that heats the star."

Brown dwarfs turn to the dark side

Brown dwarfs get the unfortunate nickname "failed stars" because, despite forming just like stars from a cloud of collapsing gas and dust, they fail to gather enough mass to trigger the fusion of hydrogen to helium in their cores.

This process powers main sequence stars like the sun. Brown dwarfs faintly glow because some nuclear fusion occurs within them and because they contract under their own gravity. But when they are located at the heart of galaxies, these failed stars may find an alternative power source.

"Dark dwarfs are very low mass objects, about 8% of the sun’s mass," Sakstein explained. "These objects collect the dark matter that helps them become a dark dwarf."

Dark matter interacts gravitationally but doesn't interact with other matter, meaning it can sink to the hearts of galaxies without too much opposition. That means the centers of galaxies are abundant with dark matter and are thus the most likely place to find dark dwarfs.

"The more dark matter you have around, the more you can capture," Sakstein said. "And, the more dark matter ends up inside the star, the more energy will be produced through its annihilation."

Dark matter can only power dark dwarfs if it interacts with itself. Even if these interactions are rare or "weak" (which would explain why we've not detected them yet), where dark matter is gravitationally crammed together, like at the heart of a brown dwarf, they could become frequent.

So the existence of dark dwarfs may eliminate non-interacting candidate particles for dark matter, as well as particles that are too light. That includes perhaps the leading dark matter candidate at the moment, axions.

"For dark dwarfs to exist, dark matter has to be made of WIMPs, or any heavy particle that interacts with itself so strongly to produce visible matter," Sakstein said.

Of course, this would all be idle speculation if the team couldn't suggest a way to detect dark dwarfs and distinguish them from non-dark matter-powered brown dwarfs or ordinary stars.

The researchers suggest a particular chemical marker that could be a dead giveaway of dark dwarfs — the isotope lithium-7, which burns easily and is therefore quickly consumed by ordinary stars.

"There were a few markers, but we suggested the lithium-7 because it would really be a unique effect," Sakstein said. "So if you were able to find an object which looked like a dark dwarf, you could look for the presence of this lithium because it wouldn’t be there if it were a brown dwarf or a similar object."

The team thinks that powerful telescopes like NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could already be capable of detecting cool and dim dark dwarfs.

"The other thing you could do is to look at a whole population of objects and ask, in a statistical manner, if it is better described by having a sub-population of dark dwarfs or not," Sakstein said.

Should a dark dwarf be detected at the heart of the Milky Way, Sakstein argues this would be "reasonably strong" evidence of WIMPS as dark matter particles.

"With light dark matter candidates, something like an axion, I don’t think you’d be able to get something like a dark dwarf. They don’t accumulate inside stars," the researcher said. "If we manage to find a dark dwarf, it would provide compelling evidence that dark matter is heavy, and interacts strongly with itself, but only weakly with the Standard Model ["ordinary" matter]. This includes classes of WIMPs, but it would include some other, more exotic models as well.

"Observing a dark dwarf wouldn’t conclusively tell us that dark matter is a WIMP, but it would mean that it is either a WIMP or something that, for all intents and purposes, behaves like a WIMP."

The team's research was published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP).

The image, produced in conjunction with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, reveals not only the location and mass of dark matter present, but also points the way toward one day figuring out what dark matter is actually made of.

In the new image, we see the hot gas within the Bullet Cluster in false-color pink, detected by Chandra. The inferred location of dark matter is represented in blue (also false color), as measured by the JWST. Note that the blue and the pink are separate — what has caused the dark matter and the gas to separate, and how were astronomers able to produce this map of the material within the Bullet Cluster?

Located 3.9 billion light-years away, the Bullet Cluster has been an occasionally controversial poster child for dark-matter studies. Back in 2006, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory worked together to image the Bullet, showing the presence of its dark matter based on how light from more distant galaxies was being gravitationally lensed by the dark matter's mass.

Collisions between galaxy clusters are the perfect laboratories for testing our ideas about dark matter, because they are nature's way of throwing together huge amounts of the stuff. This gives us a chance to test how dark matter particles interact with each other, if at all, and the degree of any interaction would be a huge clue as to the properties of the mysterious dark matter particle.

Yet despite the dramatic Hubble and Chandra images, the Bullet Cluster — and, indeed, other galaxy cluster collisions — haven't always played ball. For instance, the velocities at which the sub-clusters are colliding seem too high for the standard model of cosmology to explain.

Now the JWST has entered into the fray. A team led by Ph.D. student Sangjun Cha of Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, and professor of astronomy James Jee at both Yonsei and the University of California, Davis, have used the most powerful space telescope ever built to get a best-ever look at the Bullet Cluster.

Hubble and Chandra had previously shown that, as the two individual galaxy clusters in the Bullet Cluster collided, the galaxies and their surrounding dark matter haloes had passed right through each other. This makes sense for the galaxies — the distances between them are so great that the chance of a head-on collision between any two is slim. It also suggests that the degree with which dark matter particles interact with each other — what we refer to as their collisional cross section — is small; otherwise, the interaction would have slowed the clouds of dark matter down, and we would detect it closer to where Chandra sees the hot, X-ray emitting intracluster gas. In contrast to the dark matter, these huge gas clouds can't get out of each other's way, so they slam into each other and don't progress any further.

The end result is that the hot gas is found stuck in the middle of the collision, and the galaxies and dark matter belonging to each sub-cluster are found on opposite sides, having glided right through one another.

"Our JWST measurements support this," Jee told Space.com. "The galaxy distribution closely traces the dark matter."

JWST was able to produce a better map of the distribution of matter, both ordinary and dark, in the Bullet Cluster by detecting, for the first time, the combined glow from billions of stars that have been thrown out of their galaxies and are now free-floating in the space between the galaxies in each sub-cluster. Cha and Jee's team were then able to use the light from these "intracluster stars" to trace the presence of dark matter and gain a more accurate map of its distribution in the Bullet Cluster.

However, this has just raised more mysteries. The more refined map of the dark matter shows that, in the larger sub-cluster, on the left, the dark matter is arranged in an elongated, "hammerhead" shape that, according to Jee, "cannot be easily explained by a single head-on collision."

This elongated mass of dark matter is resolved into smaller clumps centered on what we call the brightest cluster galaxies — giant elliptical galaxies that are the brightest galaxies in the sub-cluster located at its gravitational core. In contrast, the dark matter halo around the sub-cluster on the opposite side is smaller and more compact.

Cha and Jee's team suspect that the elongated, clumpy mass of dark matter could only have formed when that particular sub-cluster, which was a galaxy cluster in its own right before the Bullet collision, underwent a similar collision and merger with another galaxy cluster billions of years before the formation of the Bullet.

"Such an event would have stretched and distorted the dark-matter halo over time, resulting in the elongated morphology that we observe," said Jee.

Despite the new discoveries such as this from JWST's more refined observations of the Bullet cluster, it is still not enough to resolve the issue of the collision velocities of the two sub-clusters.

"Even with these updates, the required collision velocity remains high relative to expectations from cosmological simulations," said Jee. "The tension persists and remains an active area of research."

Dark matter makes up over a quarter of all the mass and energy in the universe, and roughly 85% of all matter, so figuring out its secrets, in particular its collisional cross-section and the cause of those high velocities, is going to be essential if we want to better understand this universe in which we live.

Alas, the JWST observations of the Bullet Cluster alone are not enough to confirm what the collisional cross-section of dark matter must be. However, they do tighten the estimate of the upper limit for the value of the cross-section, constraining the list of possibilities.

Astronomers are already in the process of rigorously measuring as many galaxy cluster collisions as possible, seen from all angles and distances, to try and constrain this value further. Gradually, we'll be able to rule out different models for what dark matter could be, until we're left with just a few. Coupled with experimental data from direct dark matter searches from detectors deep underground, such as the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, we could soon be on the cusp of answering one of science's greatest mysteries: what is dark matter?

The JWST observations were reported on June 30 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The aim of this investigation was to discover why galaxies like the Milky Way are constructed of thick disks of stars with embedded thin stellar disks. Each of these disks feature its own distinct stellar population with its own movement.

The team behind this research wanted to know how and why this "dual-disk" structure forms, turning to observations of 111 disk galaxies that are oriented "edge-on" from our perspective here on Earth. This represented the first time astronomers had studied thick- and thin-disk structures of galaxies that existed during the infant stages of the cosmos, as early as 2.8 billion years after the Big Bang.

"This unique measurement of the thickness of the disks at high redshift, or at times in the early universe, is a benchmark for theoretical study that was only possible with the JWST," team leader Takafumi Tsukui of the Australian National University said in a statement. "Usually, the older, thick disk stars are faint, and the young, thin disk stars outshine the entire galaxy.

"But with the JWST's resolution and unique ability to see through dust and highlight faint old stars, we can identify the two-disk structure of galaxies and measure their thickness separately."

Telling the history of the Milky Way

The first step for the team was to separate the 111 galaxies in the sample into two categories: dual-disked and single-disked.

What this seemed to reveal was that galaxies grow their thick stellar disk first, with the thin disk forming at a later point.

The team thinks the timing of these disk formation processes hinges on the mass of the galaxy in question. High-mass, single-disk galaxies transformed into dual-disk structures by forming an embedded thin disk around 8 billion years ago in our approximately 14-billion-year-old universe. Lower-mass galaxies only seemed to undergo this transformation when they were around 4 billion years old.

"This is the first time it has been possible to resolve thin stellar disks at higher redshift. What's really novel is uncovering when thin stellar disks start to emerge," Emily Wisnioski, study team member and a researcher at the Australian National University, said in the statement. "To see thin stellar disks already in place 8 billion years ago, or even earlier, was surprising."

The team then set about determining what caused the transitions for these different types of galaxies. To do this, the researchers went beyond their sample of 111 galaxies to investigate how gas flowed around these subjects.

They used gas-motion data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) — a collection of 66 antennas in northern Chile that work together as a single telescope — and other ground-based observatories.

This showed that turbulent gas in the early universe triggers bouts of intense star formation in galaxies, birthing these galaxies' thick stellar disks. As these thick-disk stars form, the gas is stabilized, becoming less turbulent and thinning out. That leads to the formation of the embedded thin stellar disk.

This process, the team says, takes a different amount of time in high-mass galaxies and low-mass galaxies because the former convert gas to stars more efficiently than the latter. That means gas is depleted more rapidly in high-mass galaxies, getting them to the point at which their thin stellar disks can form more quickly.

This links to our own galaxy as well. The timing of these transitions matched the period at which the Milky Way is theorized to have grown its own thin disk of stars.

All in all, the team's research demonstrates the ability of the JWST to peer back in time and find galaxies that match the evolution of our own galaxy, allowing these galaxies to act as proxies that tell the story of the Milky Way.

The next step for this research will involve the team adding more data to see if the relationships they observed still stand.

"There is still much more we would like to explore," Tsukui said. "We want to add the type of information people usually get for nearby galaxies, like stellar motion, age and metallicity [the abundance of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium].

"By doing so, we can bridge the insights from galaxies near and far, and refine our understanding of disk formation."

The team's results appear in the July edition of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The extrasolar planet, or "exoplanet," designated TOI-4465 b is located around 400 light-years from Earth. It has a mass of around six times that of Jupiter, and it's around 1.25 times as wide as the solar system's largest planet. What is really exciting about TOI-4465 b, however, is the fact that it circles its star at a distance of around 0.4 times the distance between Earth and the sun in a flattened or "elliptical" orbit. One year for this planet takes around 102 Earth days to complete. Its distance from its star gives it an estimated temperature of between 200 and 400 degrees Fahrenheit (93 to 204 degrees Celsius).

This makes TOI-4465 b a rare case of a giant planet that is large, massive, dense, and relatively cool, existing in an underexplored region around its star in terms of what we know about planet size and mass.

Planets like TOI-4465 b are cool prospects for exoplanet scientists to study because they bridge the gap between "hot Jupiters," scorching planets that orbit so close to their stars that their years last a matter of hours, and frigid ice giant worlds like the solar system's own Neptune and Uranus.

Unfortunately, we don't know of many such worlds because they are difficult to detect.

"This discovery is important because long-period exoplanets, defined as having orbital periods longer than 100 days, are difficult to detect and confirm due to limited observational opportunities and resources," team leader and University of Mexico researcher Zahra Essack said in a statement. "As a result, they are underrepresented in our current catalog of exoplanets.

"Studying these long-period planets gives us insights into how planetary systems form and evolve under more moderate conditions.”

The rarity of such exoplanets makes TOI-4465 b a prime target for future investigation with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). But just how did the JWST's sibling, NASA spacecraft, TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), detect such an elusive planet to begin with?

Don't cross TESS. Astronomers will hunt you down

TESS detects planets when they "transit" the face of their parent star, meaning they cross between their star and Earth. This causes a tiny dip in the light received from that star.

TOI-4465 b was spotted by TESS during a single fleeting transit event. That meant, in order to confirm this planet, the team needed to observe at least one more transit event. Something easier said than done due to some frustrating complications.

"The observational windows are extremely limited," Essack explained. "Each transit lasts about 12 hours, but it is incredibly rare to get 12 full hours of dark, clear skies in one location. The difficulty of observing the transit is compounded by weather, telescope availability, and the need for continuous coverage.”

To combat these issues, the team turned to the Unistellar Citizen Science Network, calling upon 24 of its citizen scientists across 10 countries. These amateur astronomers used their personal telescopes to observe TOI-4465 b's host star.

Combining this data with observations from several professional observatories resulted in the discovery of that elusive second transit, thus confirming TOI-4465 b.

"The discovery and confirmation of TOI-4465 b not only expands our knowledge of planets in the far reaches of other star systems but also shows how passionate astronomy enthusiasts can play a direct role in frontier scientific research," Essack said.

The discovery of this planet wouldn't have been possible without international collaborations and several initiatives, including the TESS Follow-up Observing Program Sub Group 1 (TFOP SG1), the Unistellar Citizen Science Network, and the TESS Single Transit Planet Candidate (TSTPC) Working Group.

"What makes this collaboration effective is the infrastructure behind it," Essack added. "It is a great example of the power of citizen science, teamwork, and the importance of global collaboration in astronomy."

The team's research was published on Wednesday (June 25) in The Astrophysical Journal.

The galaxy next door to the Milky Way, Andromeda, has never looked as stunning as it does in a new image from NASA's Chandra X-ray space telescope.

The image of the galaxy, also known as Messier 31 (M31), was created with assistance from a range of other space telescopes and ground-based instruments including the European Space Agency (ESA) XMM-Newton mission, NASA's retired space telescopes GALEX and the Spitzer Space Telescope as well as the Infrared Astronomy Satellite, COBE, Planck, and Herschel, in addition to radio data from the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope.

All these instruments observed Andromeda in different wavelengths of light across the electromagnetic spectrum, with astronomers bringing this data together to create a stunning and intricate image. The image is a fitting tribute to astronomer Vera C. Rubin, who was responsible for the discovery of dark matter thanks to her observations of Andromeda.

As the closest large galaxy to the Milky Way, at just around 2.5 million light-years away, Andromeda has been vital in allowing astronomers to study aspects of galaxies that aren't accessible from our own galaxy. For example, from inside the Milky Way, we can't see our galaxy's spiral arms, but we can see the spiral arms of Andromeda.

Every wavelength of light that was brought together to create this incredible new image of Andromeda tells astronomers something different and unique about the galaxy next door.

For example, the X-ray data provided by Chandra has revealed the high-energy radiation released from around Andromeda's central supermassive black hole, known as M31*.

M31* is considerably larger than the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). While our home supermassive black hole has a mass 4.3 million times that of the sun, M31* dwarfs it with a mass 100 million times that of the sun. M31* is also notable for its occasional flares, one of which was observed in X-rays back in 2013, while Sgr A* is a much "quieter" black hole.

What connects Andromeda and Rubin?

Andromeda was chosen as a tribute to Rubin because this neighboring galaxy played a crucial role in the astronomer's discovery of a missing element of the universe. An element that we now call dark matter.

In the 1960s, Rubin and collaborators precisely measured the rotation of Andromeda. They found that the speed at which this galaxy's spiral arms spun indicated that the galaxy was surrounded by a vast halo of an unknown and invisible form of matter.

The mass of this matter provided the gravitational influence that was preventing Andromeda from flying apart due to its rotational speed. The gravity of its visible matter wouldn't have been sufficient to hold this galaxy together.

Since then, astronomers have discovered that all large galaxies seem to be surrounded by similar haloes of what is now known as dark matter. This has led to the discovery that the matter which comprises all the things we see around us  —  stars, planets, moons, our bodies, next door's cat  —  accounts for just 15% of the "stuff" in the cosmos, with dark matter accounting for the other 85%. The finding has also prompted the search for particles beyond the standard model of particle physics that could compose dark matter.

Thus, there's no doubt that Rubin's work delivered a watershed moment in astronomy, and one of the most important breakthroughs in modern science, fundamentally changing our concept of the universe.

June 2025 has been a brilliant month of recognition of Rubin's immense impact on astronomy and her lasting legacy. In addition to this tribute image, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first images of the cosmos as it gears up to conduct a 10-year observing program of the southern sky called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

Additionally, in recognition of Rubin's monumental contributions to our understanding of the universe, the United States Mint recently released a quarter featuring Rubin as part of its American Women Quarters Program. She is the first astronomer to be honored in the series.

The extrasolar planet, or "exoplanet," which has been designated TWA 7b, also happens to have the lowest mass of any planet that has been directly imaged beyond the solar system. With an estimated mass of around 100 times that of Earth or 0.3 times the mass of Jupiter, TWA 7b is ten times lighter than any exoplanet previously directly imaged.

TWA 7b was discovered in the debris rings that surround the low-mass star CE Antilae, also known as TWA 7, located around 111 light-years from Earth. CE Antilae is a very young star, estimated to be around just a few million years old. If that seems ancient, consider the sun, a "middle-aged" star, is around 4.6 billion years old.

CE Antilae, discovered in 1999, has long been a system of great interest to astronomers because it is seen "pole-on" from Earth. That means the disk of debris or "protoplanetary disk" that surrounds CE Antliae is seen 'from above' (or 'below'), revealing its full extent.

This has allowed astronomers to see structures in this disk that appear to have been created by the gravity of then-unseen planets and planetesimals, the "seeds" which gather mass to grow into full planets.

The disk of CE Antilae is divided into three distinct rings, one of which is narrow and bounded by two empty "lanes" mostly devoid of matter.

When imaging this ring, the JWST spotted an infrared-emitting source, which the team of astronomers determined is most likely a young exoplanet. They then used simulations that confirmed the formation of a thin ring and a "hole" exactly where this planet is positioned, corresponding to JWST observations.

The JWST is the ideal instrument to detect young low-mass planets like TWA 7b, which emit infrared radiation, the type of light the $10 billion space telescope is most sensitive to.

Directly imaging these planets is difficult because they are drowned out by light from their parent stars. The JWST is equipped with a coronagraph that blocks out the light from central stars, allowing the faint infrared emissions of orbiting exoplanets to be detected by its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

That means, though this is the lowest mass planet ever imaged and the first exoplanet discovered by the JWST, it's a safe bet that the powerful space telescope will discover many more planets as it images even lighter worlds.

The team's research was published in the journal Nature.

The observations expand the range of environments where habitable worlds might form, the researchers say. Previously, astronomers thought these harsh conditions might not be conducive to the formation of planets. Ultraviolet (UV) radiation "was long thought to pose a serious threat to the formation of planets around nearby, smaller stars," Konstantin Getman, a research professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State and co-author of a new paper describing the findings, told Space.com.

However, the results, published May 20 in The Astrophysical Journal, show that even under these harsh ultraviolet conditions, protoplanetary disks — swirling rings of gas and dust where planets are born — can still survive and evolve.

"We cannot go back in time to study how the exoplanets we observe [today were] formed," study co-author María Claudia Ramírez-Tannus, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, told Space.com. "Instead, we need to look for their younger counterparts, which are planet-forming disks that exist in extreme environments with intense ultraviolet radiation."

The study was intended as a follow-up to 2023 research that suggested Earth-like planets can indeed form in such harsh environments.In the new study, the international team focused on XUE 1, the disk surrounding a young star in this extreme environment, to investigate the disk's size, mass, temperature and chemical composition.

XUE 1 is bathed in ultraviolet radiation that's far more intense than anything our own solar system has ever experienced. "In fact, if XUE 1 was placed at the location of our solar system's sun, it would receive 100,000 times less UV energy every second than it does right now," Bayron Portilla Revelo, a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State and lead author of the new study, told Space.com.

"A very different idea"

JWST was key to the new discovery. The telescope has revolutionized the study of irradiated protoplanetary disks, offering the sensitivity and resolution needed to observe them from thousands of light-years away. "JWST is the only instrument with the sensitivity to observe relatively faint disks in very distant regions," Ramírez-Tannus said.

The team took advantage of JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which captures the cosmos in mid-infrared wavelengths of light. They used observations collected in 2023, supplemented by additional observations from the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

That data allowed the team to observe the emission from a disk that is 5,500 light-years away. To interpret the observations, the team introduced the first thermochemical computational model driven by JWST/MIRI and archival data to simulate how light, heat and chemical reactions interact within the XUE 1 protoplanetary disk.

Thermochemical models offer a big advantage for studying planet-forming disks because they let astronomers explore details such as how much material is available to form planets. "This is crucial for understanding how planetary systems like our own come to be," Portilla Revelo said.

On the other hand, thermochemical models are computationally demanding and require a large amount of data to be effective. XUE 1 has been poorly observed so far, so the limited data made the protoplanetary disk difficult to model.

The model produced synthetic light spectra, which were then compared to the real data. By matching the simulations with observations, the researchers inferred critical properties of the disk, including its temperature, density and chemical makeup.

Their analysis revealed a compact, truncated disk, where intense ultraviolet radiation significantly alters both gas temperatures and the chemistry taking place. Among the most striking findings was the presence of water — one of the key ingredients for Earth-like planets — even in such a hostile environment.

Crucially, the modeling also showed that the inner region of the disk — the zone where rocky, potentially habitable planets can form — appears to be shielded from the worst ultraviolet radiation.

"Our model indicates that the innermost part of the disk, where planets like Earth can form, seems to be unaffected by the damaging external UV radiation," Portilla Revelo said.

"Before the observations were taken, scientists had a very different idea of what the spectrum would look like," he added. "Our modeling helps explain why the JWST spectrum appears the way it does. While UV light from nearby stars strongly affects the outer regions of the disk — where giant planets are likely to form — it has little direct impact on the inner regions, which are the source of the light detected by JWST."

The findings suggest that planet formation may be more resilient than previously thought, thus expanding the range of environments where life-supporting worlds might emerge and offering a rare glimpse into the diverse stellar nurseries of our galaxy.

"By studying more of these regions — especially those exposed to strong UV light from nearby massive stars — we can better understand how such intense environments affect disks around stars of all masses and sizes," Getman said.

Astronomers analyzing data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have uncovered a population of tiny, energetic galaxies that may have been key players in clearing the cosmic fog that shrouded the universe after the Big Bang.

"You don't necessarily need to look for more exotic features," Isak Wold, an assistant research scientist at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C., told reporters during the 246th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Alaska. "These tiny but numerous galaxies could produce all the light needed for reionization."

About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled enough for charged particles to combine into neutral hydrogen atoms, creating a thick, light-absorbing fog, an era known as the cosmic dark ages. It wasn't until several hundred million years later, with the birth of the first stars and galaxies, that intense ultraviolet (UV) radiation began reionizing this primordial hydrogen. That process gradually cleared the dense fog, allowing starlight to travel freely through space and illuminating the cosmos for the first time.

For decades, astronomers have debated what triggered this dramatic transformation. The leading candidates included massive galaxies, quasars powered by black holes, and small, low-mass galaxies. New data from the JWST now points strongly to the smallest contenders, suggesting these tiny galaxies acted like cosmic flashlights lighting up the early universe.

To identify these early galaxies, Wold and his colleagues focused on a massive galaxy cluster called Abell 2744, or Pandora's Cluster, located about 4 billion light-years away in the constellation Sculptor. The immense gravity of this cluster acts as a natural magnifying glass, bending and amplifying light coming from much more distant, ancient galaxies behind it. Tapping into this quirk of nature, combined with the JWST's powerful instruments, the researchers peered nearly 13 billion years back in time.

Using the JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), the team searched for a specific green emission line from doubly ionized oxygen, a hallmark of intense star formation. This light was originally emitted in the visible range but was stretched into the infrared as it traveled through the expanding universe, according to a NASA statement.

The search yielded 83 tiny, starburst galaxies, all vigorously forming stars when the universe was just 800 million years old, around 6% of its current age.

"Our analysis [...] shows they existed in sufficient numbers and packed enough ultraviolet power to drive this cosmic renovation," Wold said in the statement.

Today, similar primitive galaxies, such as so-called "green pea" galaxies, are rare but known to release roughly 25% of their ionizing UV radiation into surrounding space. If early galaxies functioned in the same way, Wold said, they would have generated enough light to reionize the hydrogen fog and make the universe transparent.

"When it comes to producing ultraviolet light, these small galaxies punch well above their weight," he said in the statement.

The discovery could lead to a solution for one of the biggest problems in modern cosmology: how supermassive black holes could have grown to be millions or billions of times more massive than the sun before the universe was 1 billion years old.

This problem has gotten out of hand recently, thanks to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The powerful scope has been probing the early universe, discovering more and more supermassive black holes that existed just 700 million years after the Big Bang, or even earlier.

"The problem here is that, when we view the early universe with more and more powerful telescopes, which effectively allow us to see the cosmos as it was at very early times due to the finite speed of light, we keep seeing supermassive black holes," research team member John Regan, a Royal Society University research fellow at Maynooth University in Ireland, told Space.com. "This means that supermassive black holes are in place very early in the universe, within the first few hundred million years."

The processes that scientists previously proposed to explain the growth of supermassive black holes, such as rapid matter accretion and mergers between larger and larger black holes, should take more than a billion years to grow a supermassive black hole.

The earliest and most distant supermassive black hole discovered thus far by JWST is CEERS 1019, which existed just 570 million years after the Big Bang and has a mass 9 million times that of the sun. That's too big to exist 13.2 billion years or so ago, according to the established models.

"This is confusing, as the black holes must either appear at this large mass or grow from a smaller mass extremely quickly," Regan said. "We have no evidence to suggest that black holes can form with these huge masses, and we don't fully understand how small black holes could grow so rapidly."

The new research suggests that primordial black holes could have given early supermassive black holes a head start in this race.

Non-astrophysical black holes get a head start

Black holes come in an array of different masses. Stellar-mass black holes, which are 10 to 100 times heftier than the sun, are created when massive stars exhaust their nuclear fuel an die, collapsing to trigger huge supernova explosions.

Supermassive black holes have at least one million times the mass of the sun and sit at the heart of all large galaxies. They're too large to be formed when a massive star dies. Instead, these black holes are created when smaller black holes merge countless times, or by ravenously feeding on surrounding matter, or in a combination of both processes.

These two examples of black holes, as well as elusive intermediate-mass black holes, which sit in the mass gulf between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes, are classed as "astrophysical" black holes.

Scientists have long proposed the existence of "non-astrophysical" black holes, in the form of primordial black holes. The "non-astrophysical" descriptor refers to the fact that these black holes don't rely on collapsing stars or prior black holes for their existence.

Instead, primordial black holes are proposed to form directly from overdense pockets in the soup of steaming-hot matter that filled the universe in the first second after the Big Bang.

There is no observational evidence of these primordial black holes thus far. However, that hasn't stopped scientists from suggesting that these hypothetical objects could account for dark matter, the mysterious "stuff" that accounts for 85% of the matter in the universe but remains invisible because it doesn't interact with light.

The new research suggests that primordial black holes, proposed to have masses between 1/100,000th that of a paperclip and 100,000 times that of the sun, could have a big advantage in rapidly forming supermassive black holes. That's because the upper limit on their mass isn't restricted by how massive a star can get before it dies, as is the case with stellar mass black holes.

"Primordial black holes should form during the first few seconds after the Big Bang. If they exist, they have some advantages over astrophysical black holes," Regan said. "They can, in principle, be more massive to begin with compared to astrophysical black holes and may be able to settle more easily into galactic centers, where they can rapidly grow."

Primordial black holes can also get a head start on stellar-mass black holes, because they don't have to wait for the first generation of massive stars to die — a process that could take millions of years.

Regan explained that, due to their origins, astrophysical black holes can form only after the first stars run out of fuel. Even then, astrophysical black holes can still be just a few hundred solar masses in total. Additionally, negatively impacting the prospect of supermassive black hole growth from stellar-mass black holes is the fact that the energy emitted from stars during their lives and their explosive supernova deaths clears material from around the newborn black holes, depleting their potential larder and curtailing their growth.

"That can mean that there is no material for the baby black hole to accrete," Regan explained.

Primordial black holes wouldn't emit energy and wouldn't "go 'nova, eliminating this hindrance. But, they would still need to find their way to an abundant source of matter.

Do primordial black holes go supermassive at the heart of galaxies?

In the simulation performed by Regan and colleagues, primordial black holes needed to grow by accreting matter, with black hole mergers taking a backseat in the process.

"Matter in the early universe is mostly composed of hydrogen and helium," Regan continued. "These primordial black holes are expected to mostly grow by accreting hydrogen and helium. Mergers with other primordial black holes may also play a role, but accretion is expected to be dominant."

For the matter accretion of primordial black holes to be efficient enough to result in the creation of supermassive black holes, these objects need to be able to rapidly gobble up matter. That means making their way to regions of the universe where matter congregates — namely, the center of galaxies, which also happens to be where supermassive black holes lurk in the modern epoch of the cosmos.

"For this, primordial black holes need to sink to the center of a galaxy," Regan said. "This can happen if there are enough primordial black holes. Only a few have to get lucky!"

The number of primordial black holes available for this process determines whether astrophysical black holes would eventually play a role in the growth of early supermassive black holes.

"If primordial black holes are very abundant, then they can make up the whole supermassive black hole population," Regan said. "Whether primordial black holes account for the entire mass of early supermassive black holes depends on how many there are. In principle, it's possible, but my guess is that astrophysical black holes play a role, too."

Of course, these findings are based on simulations, so there is a long way to go before this theory can be confirmed. One line of observational evidence for this theory would be the detection of a massive black hole in the very, very early universe, prior even to 500 million years after the Big Bang.

Another possible line of observational evidence would be the detection of a black hole with a mass smaller than three times that of the sun in the modern-day universe. That's because no black hole so small could have formed from the supernova death and collapse of a massive star, indicating this diminutive black hole grew from a primordial one.

"I was surprised that primordial black holes grew so rapidly and that our simulations at least matched the parameter space in which they can exist," Regan said. "All we need now is a 'smoking gun' of a primordial black hole from observations — either a very low-mass black hole in the present-day universe or a really high-mass black hole in the very early universe.

"Primordial black holes, if they exist, will be hiding in the extremes!"

In lieu of such observational evidence, the team will seek to improve their cosmological simulations to strengthen the theory of supermassive black holes starting off as primordial black holes.

"The next steps are to increase the realism of the simulations. This was a first step. The simulations only had primordial black holes," Regan concluded. "Next, we want to model primordial and astrophysical black holes in the same environment and see if we can see any distinguishing characteristics."

The team's research appears as a pre-peer review paper on the repository site arXiv.

If this idea is correct, such "dark matter lampshades" could help solve the mystery of what dark matter is made of. This is a huge problem in science because, despite making up around 85% of the matter in the cosmos, no one knows what dark matter actually is.

The team's research mainly focuses on one particular candidate for dark matter: massive astrophysical compact halo objects, or "MACHOS."

The difference between MACHOs and other possible candidates for dark matter is that MACHOs are thought to be composed of the same type of matter that makes up stars, planets, and our bodies: baryonic matter.

So, whereas other dark matter candidates remain effectively invisible because they are composed of non-baryonic matter that does not interact with light, MACHOs do interact with light, albeit weakly.

"While we usually say dark matter does not interact with light at all, making it totally transparent and invisible, the truth is, it is allowed to interact with light a tiny bit," team member Melissa Diamond, from Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, told Space.com.

"Dark matter might form large clumps or clouds, often called MACHOs," she said. "There may be enough dark matter in these MACHOs that their weak interactions with light collectively block light from passing through the cloud, like how a lampshade blocks some but not all light from getting through."

She added that, if one of these lampshade-like MACHOs passes between the Earth and a distant star, we might see it block out some of the starlight, making the star look a little dimmer temporarily.

The technique also works for any form of dark matter that has weak interactions with light and which can weakly interact with itself to come together and form compact clumps.

"Certain types of millicharged dark matter or self-interacting dark matter models are some examples which may fit this description," Diamond said. "It is possible we have not seen this lampshade effect because we have not looked for it yet.

"It is also possible that we have not seen this because the types of MACHOs that could cause the lampshade effect do not make up all of the dark matter."

Lampshade hunting

The fact that dark matter seems not to interact with light (or electromagnetic radiation), or does so incredibly weakly, means that, to hunt it, astronomers have to rely on its interaction with another of the universe's four fundamental forces: gravity.

Dark matter has mass, and according to Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity, objects with mass create a curvature in space-time (the four-dimensional unification of space and time) from which gravity arises.

When ordinary matter or light rides this curvature, its motion is impacted. For light, this curvature gives rise to a phenomenon called "gravitational lensing," during which the path from a background source is curved by a body or "lens" coming between it and and Earth. This amplifies the background source.

In some cases, this amplification is so small it can't be seen for a single source but can be determined when statistically considering a multitude of background sources en masse. This is known as "gravitational microlensing."

"Compact clumps of dark matter are usually searched for with microlensing," Diamond said. "When the clump passes between the Earth and a distant star, the clump's gravity will bend space-time a little bit. This will bend the path of the starlight and focus it, like a lens, causing the star to briefly appear brighter."

Currently, microlensing surveys monitor the stars to see if any of them briefly brighten, perhaps due to passing clumps of dark matter. However, Diamond pointed out that, when the dark matter clumps become too large and puffy or diffuse, they lose their lensing power and become harder to observe in microlensing surveys.

"This is where the lampshade effect can make a big difference," she continued. "While the clump might be too puffy to make for a good lens, it can still block some starlight, causing the star to dim instead of brightening.

"The advantage of this technique is that it works for dark matter objects that are difficult or impossible to search for using available techniques."

Diamond pointed out that there are astronomical surveys, such as the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), dedicated to watching large numbers of stars over time to see if they get any brighter due to microlensing. However, these surveys could also be used for this newly proposed dark matter lampshade hunting technique.

"We can use the existing data from these surveys for free to also look for dimming from this lampshade effect," Diamond continued. "This technique lets us get new use out of existing data, and lets us look for new types of MACHOs that microlensing surveys might not otherwise be sensitive to."

One of the big issues that remains for the team is to determine how they can distinguish between dimming caused by a dark matter lampshade or dimming caused by the passage of a more conventional astronomical object.

"That is very tricky to do. Things like planets, other stars, or gas clouds might also pass in front of a distant star and cause it to dim," Diamond explained. "We would first want to estimate how often we expect 'normal' astrophysical objects to pass in front of a star and compare this to how often we expect dark objects to do the same."

She added that the team could also try to compare how the star's brightness evolves as the object passes in front of it, reasoning that something opaque, like a planet, would cause the star to appear to dim differently than something semi-transparent, like a dark matter cloud, would.

"If we see the lampshade effect in action, it will tell us about what dark matter could be, which is exciting," Diamond said. "However, if we do not, that is also exciting, because it shows us what dark matter cannot be."

"I was surprised to learn that microlensing surveys, which are designed to look for stellar brightening, are also really sensitive to stellar dimming," Diamond said. "We have not applied this technique to existing data yet, but we would be happy to do so, especially if we can work with groups that have specific MACHO models they want to search for.

"We may try to look through the existing microlensing data to see if there is any evidence for stellar dimming that could come from MACHOs."

The team's research was published in April in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The 90-minute film provides special, never-before-seen footage from the Webb film crew as they invite viewers behind the curtains of one of the most ambitious scientific endeavors in history.

“At NASA, we’re thrilled to share the untold story of our James Webb Space Telescope in our new film ‘Cosmic Dawn,’ celebrating not just the discoveries, but the extraordinary people who made it all happen, for the benefit of humanity,” Rebecca Sirmons, head of NASA+ at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, said in a statement.

Viewers can watch the documentary on NASA+, YouTube or other streaming platforms.

The story of the James Webb Space Telescope begins 30 years ago, as NASA scientists were beginning to discuss a new space telescope, then called the Next Generation Space Telescope. Over the next three decades, NASA collaborated with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency to design a telescope of incredible ambition and complexity. The project ended up costing over $10 billion — far above the original estimate —and involved thousands of scientists, engineers, and technicians worldwide.

“Webb was a mission that was going to be spectacular whether that was good or bad — if it failed or was successful. It was always going to make history,” explained NASA video producer Sophia Roberts in a statement.

From the first sketches in 1996 to the final launch preparations, “Cosmic Dawn” follows mission leaders as they overcome challenge after challenge, including massive budget overruns, re-designs, and engineering setbacks.

The documentary gives viewers inside access to the exclusive spaces where the telescope was made, from mirror assembly sites to clean rooms at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Along the way, watchers get a crash course in high-stakes telescope design and assembly.

With over 300 individual components that all have to work together, the design and construction of the James Webb Space Telescope gave experts a particularly difficult set of engineering problems, from trying to fit the telescope into a rocket to cleaning its mirrors without damaging them. Woven throughout the documentary are several personal stories from the engineers and scientists working on the project. The interviewees discuss working on this cutting-edge piece of space technology while avoiding several near-disasters in the process, including hurricanes and extreme weather.

“There was nothing easy about Webb at all,” said Webb project manager Bill Ochs in a NASA press release. “I don’t care what aspect of the mission you looked at.”

Interspersed with the engineering processes are beautiful photos of the universe, taken by both the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope. Viewers are treated to stunning nebulas and stars from the deepest pockets of our galaxy as astronomers explain how the James Webb Space Telescope can peer farther back in time than any telescope before it.

As part of NASA’s 66-year commitment to sharing and documenting its work, “Cosmic Dawn” highlights the human spirit to reach for the stars. It’s a must-watch documentary for students and space enthusiasts alike.

The exoplanet — named 14 Herculis c, or 14 Her c for short — orbits a sunlike star about 60 light-years from Earth in the constellation Hercules. In the new JWST image, it appears as a faint, fuzzy orange dot, its color a result of heat radiating from its atmosphere translated into visible hues.

Astronomers estimate that 14 Her c formed around 4 billion years ago and has a frigid atmospheric temperature of just 26 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 3 degrees Celsius).

14 Her c orbits its star at a distance of about 1.4 billion miles (2.2 billion kilometers), or roughly 15 times farther from its star than Earth is from the sun. If placed in our solar system, it would sit between Saturn and Uranus.

But, unlike the flat, well-ordered orbits of planets in our solar system, the 14 Herculis system is dramatically misaligned. Its two known planets, including 14 Her c, orbit at angles of about 40 degrees to each other, creating an "X"-like crossing pattern around their star.

This unusual layout may have been caused by the early ejection of a third massive planet from the system, throwing the remaining two into a gravitationally turbulent "planetary tug of war," Balmer said.

"These wobbles appear to be stable over long time scales," he said. "We're trying to understand what kinds of planet-planet scatterings could produce such an exotic configuration of orbits."

This instability turned out to be a scientific advantage for Balmer's team. Of the nearly 6,000 known exoplanets, only a small fraction have been directly imaged.

"Doing this is very technically challenging," said Balmer. Planets shine thousands — and, in some cases, even millions or billions — of times fainter than the stars they orbit, so they "are like fireflies next to lighthouses," he said.

Most directly imaged exoplanets are hot, young gas giants that emit enough infrared light to stand out from the intense glare of their host stars. In contrast, colder and older planets like 14 Her c are usually far too dim to detect.

The planet's tilted, off-kilter orbit, however, "is great news for direct imaging," Balmer said. "We could confidently predict that JWST could resolve the outermost planet in the system."

Using the telescope's specialized starlight-blocking device known as a coronagraph, Balmer and his team succeeded in isolating the planet's faint infrared glow.

"We are now able to add to the catalog older exoplanets that are far colder than we've directly seen before Webb," Balmer said in a statement.

Based on 14 Her c's estimated age of around 4 billion years, its mass of about seven times that of Jupiter, and computer models of how planets evolve, the researchers expected the planet to appear brighter — or emit more heat — than it actually does in the JWST image.

"The planet's actually significantly fainter than what we'd expect," said Balmer. "We don't think that this is a problem with the evolutionary models, however."

Probing the world's atmosphere, JWST detected carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide at temperatures where methane would typically be expected, which suggests that strong updrafts carry hot gases from deep within the atmosphere to colder upper layers, Balmer said. These gases, possibly along with thin icy clouds, reduce the heat escaping into space, making the planet appear cooler and fainter than expected.

With 14 Her c, astronomers have broadened the range of exoplanets they can study. By examining planets with diverse masses, temperatures and orbital histories, scientists hope to gain a deeper understanding of how planetary systems, including our own, form and evolve.

"We want to understand how these planets change, because we want to understand how we got here," said Balmer.

The discovery of the haze was predicted back in 2017 by planetary scientist Xi Zhang of the University of California, Santa Cruz, to explain why Pluto's thin atmosphere is so leaky. Based on measurements from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which hurtled past Pluto and Charon in 2015, planetary scientist Will Grundy at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona calculated that Pluto's atmosphere is losing 1.3 kilograms (2.9 pounds) of methane to space every second, and about 2.5% of this methane is being intercepted by Charon, staining its poles red with organic chemistry. Nowhere else in the solar system do we see an atmosphere leaking onto a neighboring body.

The cause of this atmospheric escape was unknown, but Zhang reasoned that if Pluto's atmosphere contained a layer of haze, then this haze would absorb what little extreme ultraviolet light from the distant sun reaches Pluto, providing the energy to give molecules the nudge they need to escape into space.

Besides the haze heating the atmospheric molecules so that they can escape, Zhang also realized that the haze could have a cooling effect on Pluto's atmosphere — an effect that had previously been detected in Pluto's mesosphere, which is the third layer of the atmosphere above the virtually non-existent troposphere and the denser stratosphere.

Pluto's mesosphere is found between 20 kilometers and 40 kilometers (12.4 to 24.9 miles) high and reaches a maximum temperature of minus 163 degrees Celsius (110 Kelvin/minus 262 degrees Fahrenheit) before cooling at a rate of 0.2 degrees Celsius per kilometer, to a minimum of minus 203 degrees C (70 Kelvin/minus 334 degrees F).

The problem was that, until now, no haze had been detected on Pluto. Then along came the JWST.

Zhang had predicted that any atmospheric cooling spurred on by a layer of haze would result in thermal emission at mid-infrared wavelengths. Mid-infrared emission had been detected coming from the Pluto-Charon system before, going all the way back to Europe's Infrared Space Observatory in 1997, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope in 2004, and Europe's Herschel Space Observatory in 2012. However, on each occasion, the telescope lacked the resolution to distinguish between Pluto and Charon and determine where the emission was coming from. But JWST, with its 6.5-meter (21.4 feet) primary mirror and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), is able to distinguish between Pluto and Charon. So Zhang, as part of a team led by Tanguy Bertrand of the Observatoire de Paris, was able to use JWST to detect the thermal mid-infrared emission from the long-elusive haze.

"We use the term 'haze' to describe layers of solid aerosols suspended high in an atmosphere," Bertrand told Space.com. "These aerosols scatter light and reduce visibility, forming a diffuse and semi-transparent layer."

Pluto's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, with a smidgen of carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons such as methane, benzene, diacetylene and hydrogen cyanide. This atmosphere is exceptionally thin; the surface pressure is just 13 microbars, in comparison to Earth's surface pressure of about 1 bar. (One bar is equivalent to one million microbars.) And because of Pluto's low gravity, the upper atmosphere extends quite a long way from the surface, by several Pluto radii (the radius of Pluto is 1,188.3 kilometers, or 737 miles). All molecules need is a slight nudge to send them spinning out of the atmosphere, and the energy to give them that nudge comes from the sun.

"A significant fraction of the incoming solar extreme ultraviolet radiation is absorbed by the upper atmosphere, leading to heating that powers atmospheric mass loss," said Bertrand. "Atmospheric gases such as nitrogen and methane are responsible for absorbing radiation at these wavelengths."

But how can the haze alternatively cause both atmospheric heating and cooling?

"Cooling or heating depends on the haze properties, such as particle size, shape and composition — i.e., icy with hydrocarbon ice, or non-icy — which are not very well known," said Bertrand. "We are currently investigating this with state-of-the-art microphysical [i.e., on the scale of atoms and molecules] models."

The ability of the haze to cool or heat the atmosphere means that it therefore controls the balance of energy in Pluto's atmosphere, affecting global temperatures, atmospheric circulation and what passes for climate on the frigid dwarf planet. This climate system is dominated by cycles of sublimation and freezing out of molecular nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide, much of which hails from the deep glacier in Sputnik Planitia, which is the heart-shaped feature on the dwarf planet's surface.

Zhang described for Space.com this energy balance in detail. "Based on New Horizon's temperature observations from 2015, we found that gas heating significantly exceeds gas cooling," he said. "So there is a net radiative heating of the atmosphere. To maintain energy balance under these conditions, the haze must provide the necessary net radiative cooling. But it remains unclear whether haze has a net cooling effect during other seasons, as Pluto's seasons vary dramatically!"

Those "seasons" are so drastically different because of Pluto's elongated orbit, which takes it from closer to the sun than Neptune to almost twice as far out. Even out here, in the depths of the solar system, this difference in distance markedly affects the amount of heating Pluto receives.

Pluto's haze is similar to the hydrocarbon-rich haze found on Saturn's moon Titan. Both hazes result from the photochemistry of solar extreme ultraviolet light reacting with molecules such as nitrogen and methane. Even the early Earth, prior to the rise of an oxygen-enriched atmosphere over 2.4 billion years ago, may have harbored a haze of hydrocarbons in its atmosphere similar to Pluto, albeit much more dense. Understanding Pluto's atmosphere could therefore potentially teach us something about our own planet's beginnings.

The new study was published in the journal Nature Astronomy on June 2

The new find could help better define the mass dividing line between large planets and small brown dwarfs, as well as that between large brown dwarfs and small stars.

"The new brown dwarfs are the least massive known brown dwarfs," lead researcher Kevin Luhman of Pennsylvania State University told Space.com. "They place a new constraint on the lowest mass at which brown dwarfs exist."

"In addition, one of the brown dwarfs near two Jupiter masses exhibits evidence of a disk of gas and dust, indicating that it may have the raw materials for making planets," Luhman said. "So it is possible that the planetary systems exist in which the central 'sun' is only twice the mass of Jupiter."

The team found the small brown dwarfs lurking among young stars in IC 348, a star-forming cluster in the Perseus Molecular Cloud around 1,000 light-years from Earth.

The stars that failed and the telescope that didn't

Brown dwarfs get the slightly unfair nickname of "failed stars" from the fact that, though they form like stars from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust, they can't gather enough mass from their prenatal envelopes to trigger the fusion of hydrogen to helium within their cores.

This is the nuclear process that defines what a main sequence star is; hence, brown dwarfs are cast as "failed stars." That's despite the fact that they conduct some forms of nuclear fusion within their bodies.

Currently, the mass limit of brown dwarfs is considered to be between 13 to 60 times the mass of Jupiter, or 0.013 to 0.08 times the mass of the sun.

The new discovery — of two brown dwarfs with masses around twice the mass of Jupiter, or about 0.002 times the mass of the sun — radically widens that mass scale.

"It is also surprising that the process that makes stars is able to produce objects down to only twice the mass of Jupiter, 500 times smaller in mass than the sun," Luhman said.

If the discovery of such small brown dwarfs was a surprise, then something else the team discovered about these failed stars in IC 348 was a complete shock.

The new brown dwarfs also exhibit signals from an unidentified hydrocarbon, a chemical compound composed solely of hydrogen and carbon atoms. Its origin is a mystery, team members said.

"The presence of an unidentified, non-methane hydrocarbon is completely unexpected and unexplained," Luhman said. "Because of the presence of that hydrocarbon, we have proposed a new spectral class (H) that is defined by the presence of that species."

These hydrocarbons have only previously been observed in the atmospheres of Saturn and its largest moon, Titan, according to Luhman.

The cool atmosphere of the brown dwarfs was integral to the detection of these hydrocarbons by the JWST, which has been anything but a failure when it comes to studying these failed stars.

"Because they are cool, brown dwarfs are brightest at infrared wavelengths, and JWST is the most sensitive infrared telescope to date," Luhman said. "The next steps for this research include performing new JWST spectroscopy at higher resolution to better constrain the species of hydrocarbon that have been detected.

"In addition, we need theorists to develop models of the atmospheres of brown dwarfs that can explain why our new brown dwarfs have the unidentified hydrocarbon, but don't have methane, which is the hydrocarbon normally observed in older brown dwarfs."

Additionally, the team will analyze the JWST spectra of the remaining brown dwarf candidates they identified to confirm that they are brown dwarfs.

Two of these candidates could have masses as low as the mass of Jupiter, hinting at a further shakeup of our concept of the brown dwarf mass range.

Luhman is confident that, if such tiny, paradigm-shifting brown dwarfs are out there, especially in IC 348, JWST will find them.

"Much deeper JWST images of the cluster that we studied could potentially detect brown dwarfs below the mass of Jupiter, if they exist at those masses," the researcher concluded.

The team's research was published on Tuesday (June 10) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a youthful star located 300 light-years away. The system's two planets, YSES-1 b and YSES-1 c, are packed with coarse, rough, and frankly irritating silica material (we get you, Anakin, it does get everywhere).

Astronomers say this discovery around a star that is just 16.7 million years old could hint at how the planets and moons of our 4.6 billion-year-old solar system took shape. As both planets are gas giants, they could offer astronomers an opportunity to study the real-time evolution of planets like Jupiter and Saturn.

"Observing silicate clouds, which are essentially sand clouds, in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets is important because it helps us better understand how atmospheric processes work and how planets form, a topic that is still under discussion since there is no agreement on the different models," team member Valentina D'Orazi of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) said in a statement. "The discovery of these sand clouds, which remain aloft thanks to a cycle of sublimation and condensation similar to that of water on Earth, reveals complex mechanisms of transport and formation in the atmosphere.

"This allows us to improve our models of climate and chemical processes in environments very different from those of the solar system, thus expanding our knowledge of these systems."

Building a 'sandcastle' world

One of these extrasolar planets, or "exoplanets," YSES-1 c, has a mass around 14 times the mass of Jupiter. On YSES-1 c, this silica matter is located in clouds in its atmosphere, which gives it a reddish hue and creates sandy rains that fall inward towards its core.

We guess that the future Darth Vader didn't build too many sandcastles in his youth, but that process is analogous to the formation of sandy matter that YSES-1 b is undergoing.

Already possessing a mass around six times that of Jupiter, the still-forming sandcastle planet YSES-1 b is surrounded by a flattened cloud or "circumplanetary disk" that is supplying it with building materials, including silicates.

Not only is this the first direct observation of silica clouds (specifically iron-rich pyroxene or a combination of bridgmanite and forsterite) high in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, but it is also the first time silicates have been detected in a circumplanetary disk.

The JWST was able to make such detailed direct observations of both planets thanks to the great distances at which they orbit their parent star, which is equivalent to between 5 and 10 times the distance between the sun and its most distant planet, the ice giant Neptune.

Though this technique is still restricted to a small number of planets beyond the solar system, this research exemplifies the capability of the JWST to provide high-quality spectral data for exoplanets. This opens the possibility of studying both the atmospheres and circumplanetary environments of exoplanets in far greater detail.

"By studying these planets, we can better understand how planets form in general, a bit like peering into the past of our solar system," added D'Orazi. "The results support the idea that cloud compositions in young exoplanets and circumplanetary disks play a crucial role in determining atmospheric chemical composition.

"Furthermore, this study highlights the need for detailed atmospheric models to interpret the high-quality observational data obtained with telescopes such as JWST."

The team's results were published on Tuesday (June 10) in the journal Nature, the same day as they were presented at the 246th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Anchorage, Alaska.

Although now too distant to observe from Earth, the asteroid briefly came into view in May for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Using data from the telescope's Near-Infrared Camera, a team led by Andy Rivkin of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory refined predictions of where 2024 YR4 will be on Dec. 22, 2032 by nearly 20%. That revised trajectory nudged the odds of a lunar impact from 3.8% to 4.3%, according to a NASA update.

"As data comes in, it is normal for the impact probability to evolve," the statement read. Even if a collision occurs, "it would not alter the moon's orbit."

Astronomer Pawan Kumar, a former researcher at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bengaluru, agrees the moon is safe, noting a collision with the moon "won't be a cause for concern" because any moon debris blasted into space from the impact "blow up in Earth's atmosphere if any of it makes it to near-Earth space."

First detected on Dec. 27 last year, 2024 YR4 is estimated to be about 174 to 220 feet long (53 to 67 meters), or about the size of a 10-story building. The asteroid quickly grabbed headlines for having more than a 1% chance of striking Earth, the highest recorded for any large asteroid. Follow-up observations in January and February saw the impact risk climb from 1.2% to a peak of 3.1%.

The asteroid's projected trajectory at the time suggested it could cause blast damage across a wide potential impact zone, spanning the eastern Pacific, northern South America, Africa and southern Asia. If it enters Earth's atmosphere over the ocean, NASA estimated it would be unlikely to trigger significant tsunamis, but an airburst over a populated city could shatter windows and cause minor structural damage.

However, the impact risk dropped sharply as additional orbital data came in. By Feb. 19, the probability had fallen to 1.5%, and then to 0.3% the next day. On Feb. 24, NASA announced an official "all clear" on social media, reporting the impact probability had dropped to just 0.004% and that the asteroid is "expected to safely pass by Earth in 2032."

Further analysis has since allowed scientists to rule out any risk to Earth, not only in 2032 but from all future close approaches as well. Data from telescopes in Chile and Hawaii recently suggested the space rock originated in the central main belt between Mars and Jupiter and gradually shifted into a near-Earth orbit.

Since mid-April, the asteroid has been too far away and too faint to be seen from Earth. It will swing back into view in 2028, giving scientists another chance to observe the asteroid and further refine its orbit using both JWST and ground-based telescopes. In particular, scientists will aim to gather more data on its shape and composition, which are key factors in understanding both its behavior and potential impact effects.

While 2024 YR4 no longer poses any danger, it provided scientists with a rare, real-world opportunity to rehearse the full scope of planetary defense strategy, ranging from initial detection and risk analysis to public messaging. It was "an actual end-to-end exercise" for how we might respond to a potentially hazardous asteroid in the future, said Kumar.

"2024 YR4 is a tailor-made asteroid for planetary defense efforts," he said. "It has everything it takes to get our attention."

The images come from COSMOS-Web, the largest observing program the James Webb Space Telescope undertook in its first year. It surveyed a patch of sky equivalent to the width of three full moons placed side-by-side, the telescope's widest observation area to date. The survey stitched together more than 10,000 exposures, revealing nearly 800,000 galaxies, many of which shine from the universe's earliest eras. Harnessing the abundance of data that came from this effort, on Thursday (June 5), the team released the largest contiguous image ever captured by the JWST, along with a free, interactive catalog detailing the properties of each galaxy — a cosmic record that's as vast as it is richly detailed.

"I don't know if the James Webb Space Telescope will ever cover an area of this size again, and so I think it'll be a good reference and a good data set that people will use for many years," Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an astrophysicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and the lead researcher of COSMOS-Web, told Space.com. "The hope is that, now, anybody at any institution can make use of this data for their own science."

When the JWST launched in 2021, the global COSMOS-Web team comprising nearly 50 researchers from institutions around the world was awarded over 200 hours of observation time, the most allocated to any project in the telescope's inaugural year. While many JWST studies zoom in on small, deep slices of sky, COSMOS-Web prioritized breadth, capturing a wider cosmic canvas that brought to light 10 times more galaxies than astronomers anticipated from these early epochs.

"It was incredible to reveal galaxies that were previously invisible at other wavelengths, and very gratifying to finally see them appear on our computers," Maximilien Franco, postdoctoral researcher of astrophysics at the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K., said in a statement.

The JWST's expansive view allows astronomers not only to catalog distant galaxies, but also to study how their characteristics — including size, shape and brightness — are shaped by their cosmic environments, such as whether they reside in isolation or in crowded regions. "That tells us a lot about what influenced them as they evolved," Kartaltepe said.

Alongside the catalog, the COSMOS-Web team has published a series of scientific papers exploring the data. One study, posted to the preprint archive arXiv on Wednesday (June 4), examines the most luminous galaxies at the centers of galaxy groups, tracing how their structure and star forming activity have co-evolved over the past 12 billion years.

A key science goal of the project was to map the earliest structures during the Reionization Era (which fell more than 13 billion years ago) when the first galaxies ignited and began clearing the thick hydrogen fog that blanketed the early cosmos. To achieve this, Kartaltepe and her team plan early galaxies as tracers to measure the size of "reionization bubbles," vast regions where light from stars and galaxies carved clearings in the primordial haze.

"That's not something we finished yet," Kartaltepe said. "But that was the main goal, and something that we're really excited about."

Another paper, which was also posted to arXiv on Wednesday, tests a machine learning technique that can estimate the physical properties of galaxies in the massive dataset. The team also developed a new method to measure the brightness of distant galaxies more accurately. Unlike traditional techniques that simply sum the light within a fixed area, this approach models how light is spread across a galaxy, enabling more precise measurements that allow researchers to combine JWST images with blurrier ground-based data without losing important details.

Three more studies detail the team's data processing efforts over the past two years, a meticulous process involving aligning and cleaning more than 10,000 individual images. As a brand-new observatory, the JWST brought unexpected challenges. The telescope's images included unforeseen artifacts, such as noise patterns and distortions, which the team had to carefully correct.

Despite these hurdles, the JWST outperformed pre-launch models predicting how faint or distant galaxies it could detect, said Kartaltepe. "The reality turned out to be better — we were able to go deeper than what we expected."

The catalog holds "incredible potential," she added.

"There's still so much we don't know."

The planet, known as WASP-121b, is locked in a dangerously close orbit around a star roughly 900 light-years away that's brighter and hotter than our sun. Locked in a blistering 30-hour orbit, the world lies so close to its star that intense tidal forces have warped it into a football-like shape, leaving it on the verge of being torn apart by gravity. One side of the planet faces its star permanently, baking at temperatures over 3,000°C (5,400°F) — hot enough for it to rain liquid iron. Even the opposite hemisphere, locked in eternal night, simmers at 1,500°C (2,700°F). This extreme environment makes WASP-121b one of the most hostile planets ever observed, and a valuable target for planetary science.

Now, using the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) Near Infrared Spectrograph instrument, or NIRSpec, a team led by astronomer Thomas Evans-Soma of the University of New Castle in Australia detected a cocktail of molecules in the planet's atmosphere that each carry chemical clues to its dramatic journey. These include water vapor, carbon monoxide, methane and, for the first time ever in a planetary atmosphere, silicon monoxide.

Together, they tell a dramatic origin story of WASP-121b written in vapor and stone, described in two papers published Monday (June 2).

"Studying the chemistry of ultra hot planets like WASP-121b helps us to understand how gas giant atmospheres work under extreme temperature conditions," Joanna Barstow, a planetary scientist at the Open University in the U.K. and a co-author of both new studies, said in a statement.

The findings from both studies suggest WASP-121b did not form where it is today. Instead, it likely originated in a colder, more distant region of its planetary system, similar to the zone between Jupiter and Uranus in our own solar system. There, it would have accumulated methane-rich ices and heavy elements, embedding a distinct chemical signature in its growing atmosphere.

Later, gravitational interactions — possibly with other planets — would have sent WASP-121b spiraling inward toward its star. As it moved closer, its supply of icy, oxygen-rich pebbles would've been cut off, but it should have been able to continue gathering carbon-rich gas. This would explain why the world's atmosphere today contains more carbon than oxygen, a chemical imbalance that offers a snapshot of its journey through the disk.

To make sense of the complex atmospheric data, the second team of researchers, led by Cyril Gapp of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, created 3D models of the planet's atmosphere, accounting for the vast temperature differences between the day and night sides. Their simulations, described in a paper published in The Astronomical Journal, helped separate signals from different regions of the planet as it orbited, revealing how molecules shift and circulate throughout the orbit.

Among the molecules newly detected, the presence of silicon monoxide was particularly revealing, scientists say, as it isn't typically found in the gaseous form they observed. Instead, the researchers suggest this gas was originally locked in solid minerals like quartz within asteroid-size planetesimals that crashed into the young planet. Over time, as the planet grew and spiraled inward toward its star, those materials would have been vaporized and mixed into its atmosphere, according to one of the new papers, published in Nature Astronomy.

On the cooler "night" side of WASP-121b, the researchers found an abundance of methane gas. This came as a surprise as methane typically breaks down under such heat, the study notes.

"Given how hot this planet is, we weren't expecting to see methane on its nightside," study co-author Anjali Piette, who is an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Birmingham, said in a statement.

Its presence suggests methane is being replenished, likely pulled up from deeper, cooler layers of the atmosphere.

"This challenges exoplanet dynamical models, which will likely need to be adapted to reproduce the strong vertical mixing we've uncovered on the nightside of WASP-121b," study lead author Thomas Evans-Soma of the University of New Castle in Australia added in another statement.

"First and foremost, at the moment, this is the most distant object known to humanity. That title changes every so often, but I find it is always cause for pause and reflection," team member and Yale University professor of Astronomy and Physics Pieter van Dokkum told Space.com. "MoM z14 existed when the universe was about 280 million years old - we're getting quite close to the Big Bang.

"Just to put that in context, sharks have been around on Earth for a longer timespan!"

The JWST is seeing red again

Since it began sending data back to Earth in the summer of 2022, the JWST has excelled in detecting galaxies at so-called "high redshifts."

Redshift refers to the phenomenon of the wavelength of light from distant and thus early sources being stretched and shifted toward the "red end" of the electromagnetic spectrum as it traverses expanding space.

The earlier and thus further away an object is, the greater the redshift.

Prior to the discovery of MoM z14, the galaxy holding the title of earliest and distant was JADES-GS-z14-0, which existed just 300 million years after the Big Bang, or around 13.5 billion years ago.

This previous record galaxy has a redshift of z =14.32, while MoM z14 has a redshift of z = 14.44.

What do we know about the mother of all early galaxies?

There is a wider context to the observation of MoM z14 than the fact that it has broken the record for earliest known galaxy by 20 million years, though, as van Dokkum explained.

"The broader story here is that JWST was not expected to find any galaxies this early in the history of the universe, at least not at this stage of the mission," van Dokkum said. "There are, very roughly, over 100 more relatively bright galaxies in the very early universe than were expected based on pre-JWST observations."

Also, in addition to detecting this new, earliest, and most distant galaxy, the team was able to determine some of its characteristics using the JWST.

The researchers were able to determine that MoM z14 is around 50 times smaller than the Milky Way. The team also measured emission lines from the galaxy, indicating the presence of elements like nitrogen and carbon.

"The emission lines are unusual; it indicates that the galaxy is very young, with a rapidly increasing rate of forming new stars," van Dokkum said. "There are also indications that there is not much neutral hydrogen gas surrounding the galaxy, which would be surprising: the very early universe is expected to be filled with neutral hydrogen.

"That needs even better spectra and more galaxies, to investigate more fully."

The presence of carbon and nitrogen in MoM z14 indicates that there are earlier galaxies to be discovered than this 13.52 billion-year-old example.

That is because the very earliest galaxies in the universe and their stars were filled with the simplest elements in the cosmos, hydrogen and helium.

Later galaxies would be populated by these heavier elements, which astronomers somewhat confusingly call "metal," as their stars forged them and then dispersed them in supernova explosions.

"MoM z14 is not one of the very first objects that formed in the universe, as the stars in those galaxies are composed of hydrogen and helium only - we would not see carbon or nitrogen," van Dokkum said. "It could be part of the first wave of formation of 'normal' galaxies, that is, the first galaxies that have elements like nitrogen and carbon - but we've thought that before!"

As for finding even earlier galaxies than MoM z14 and perhaps even detecting that first generation, van Dokkum is confident that the JWST is up to the task.

He explained: "The JWST continues to push the boundary beyond where we thought it was, and at this point I would not be surprised if we find galaxies at z =15 or z =16!"

For now, van Dokkum and the rest of this team, led by Rohan Naidu of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, can celebrate breaking new ground in our understanding of the early cosmos.

"In a program like this, the whole team is always hoping for a 'miracle,' that is, that some of the candidate extremely early galaxies actually pan out and are not 'mirages,' objects whose colors look like extremely early objects," van Dokkum concluded. "While we were hoping for some very early objects, I don't think any of us expected to break the redshift record!"

A pre-peer-reviewed version of the team's research is published on the paper repository site arXiv.

The James Webb Space Telescope captured this stunning image of a galaxy cluster so massive that it serves a gravitational lens, warping the light and revealing more distant galaxies from the early universe.

What is it?

Abell S1063 is a cluster of galaxies that displays a strong gravitational lens effect, in which the light from distant galaxies behind the cluster is bent around it due to Abell S1063's mass, which creates a curvature in spacetime and forms the warped arcs that appear to surround it in the image.

JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) was able to use this effect, previously observed by the Hubble Space Telescope, to reveal a multitude of faint galaxies and previously unseen features.

Where is it?

Galaxy cluster Abell S1063 lies about 4.5 billion light-years from Earth in the southern constellation Grus, the Crane. The distorted background galaxies are at a range of cosmic distances.

Why is it amazing?

JWST is adept at taking these types of images, known as a "deep field." When making these images, the telescope takes a long exposure of a single area of the sky in order to gather as much light as possible. Doing so can help the telescope see distant, faint galaxies that other observatories can't.

"With 9 separate snapshots of different near-infrared wavelengths of light, totalling around 120 hours of observing time and aided by the magnifying effect of gravitational lensing, this is Webb's deepest gaze on a single target to date," the European Space Agency wrote in a statement.

"Focusing such observing power on a massive gravitational lens, like Abell S1063, therefore has the potential to reveal some of the very first galaxies formed in the early universe."

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about gravitational lensing and how the James Webb Space Telescope was pushed to its limits to see the most distant galaxies. You can also see the Hubble Space Telescope's view of galaxy cluster Abell S1063.

The signs were rooted in a tentative detection of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) — a molecule produced on Earth solely by marine life — and/or its close chemical relative DMDS, which is also a potential biosignature, in the atmosphere of the exoplanet. This finding, along with the possibility that K2-18b is a "Hycean world" with a liquid water ocean, sparked significant interest about its potential to support life.

However, these results have sparked intense debate among astronomers. While recognizing this finding would be a groundbreaking achievement and a major testament to the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) capabilities if true, many scientists remain skeptical, questioning both the reliability of the detected DMS signature as well as whether DMS itself is a dependable sign of life in the first place. As such, many independent teams have been conducting follow-up studies about the original claims — and a newly published one only adds to the debate, suggesting the Cambridge scientists' DMS detection wasn't significant enough to warrant the publicity it received.

"Among the physical sciences, astronomy enjoys a privileged position," Rafael Luque, a post doctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, told Space.com. "It is more frequently covered in the media thanks to its visual appeal and the big philosophical and universal questions it addresses. It was therefore expected that — even if tentative — the detection of a potential biomarker in the atmosphere of an exoplanet would have extensive coverage."

The significance of significance

Luque and his colleagues, including fellow postdoctoral researchers Caroline Piaulet-Ghorayeb and Michael Zhang, remain unconvinced that what astronomers observed on K2-18b was in fact a credible signature indicating life. In a recent arxiv preprint — which is yet to be peer-reviewed — their team re-examined the validity of the original evidence. "This is how science works: evidence and counterevidence go hand in hand,” he stated.

When scientists study data from different instruments separately, they might end up with conflicting results — it's like finding two different "stories" about a subject that don't match. "This is, in fact, what happened in the original team's papers," Zhang told Space.com. "They inferred a much higher temperature from their MIRI (mid-infrared) data than from their NIRISS and NIRSpec (near-infrared) data. Fitting all the data with the same model ensures that we're not telling contradictory stories about the same planet."

Thus, the team conducted a joint analysis of K2-18b using data from all three of the JWST's key instruments — the Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) and the Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), which capture near-infrared light, and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which detects longer mid-infrared wavelengths. The goal was to ensure a consistent, planet-wide interpretation of K2-18b's spectrum that the team felt the original studies both lacked.

"We reanalyzed the same JWST data used in the study published earlier this year, but in combination with other JWST observations of the same planet published […] two years ago," Piaulet-Ghorayeb told Space.com. "We found that the stronger signal claimed in the 2025 observations is much weaker when all the data are combined."

These signals may appear weaker when all data is combined because the initial "strong" detection may have been overestimated, the team says, due to being based on a limited initial data set. Combining data from multiple sources lets scientists cross-check and verify the strength — and validity — of a particular signal.

"Different data reduction methods and retrieval codes always give slightly different results, so it is important to try multiple methods to see how robust the results are," explained Piaulet-Ghorayeb. "We never saw more than insignificant hints of either DMS or DMDS, and even these hints were not present in all data reductions."

"Importantly, we showed that when testing a wider range of molecules that we expect to be produced abiotically in the atmosphere, the same observed spectral features can be reproduced without the need for DMS or DMDS," she continued.

More than one path to a result

Molecules in an exoplanet's atmosphere are typically detected through spectral analysis, which identifies unique "chemical fingerprints" based on how the planet's atmosphere absorbs specific wavelengths of starlight as it passes — or transits — in front of its host star. This absorption leaves distinct patterns in the light spectrum that reveal the presence of different molecules.

"Each molecule’s signature is unique, but different molecules can have some features that fall in similar places because of their close molecular structures," explained Piaulet-Ghorayeb.

The difference between DMS and ethane — a common molecule in exoplanet atmospheres — is just one sulfur atom, and current spectrometers, including those on the JWST, have impressive sensitivity, but still face limits. The distance to exoplanets, the faintness of signals, and the complexity of atmospheres mean distinguishing between molecules that differ by just one atom is extremely challenging.

"It is widely recognized as a huge problem for biomarker detection, though not an insurmountable one, because different molecules do have subtly different absorption features," said Piaulet-Ghorayeb. "Until we can separate these signals more clearly, we have to be especially careful not to misinterpret them as signs of life."

Beyond technical limitations, another source of skepticism is how the data has been interpreted statistically. Luque points out that the 2023 study described the detection of DMS as "tentative," reflecting the preliminary nature of the finding. However, the most recent 2025 paper reported that the detection of DMS and/or DMDS reached 3-sigma significance — a level that, while below the 5-sigma threshold required for a confirmed discovery, is generally considered moderate statistical evidence.

"Surprisingly, this latest work was used to double down on the claim for DMS and even more complex molecules to be present. The detection, however, is not statistically significant nor robust, as we show in our work.

Despite these uncertainties, the team is worried that media coverage has continued to spotlight bold claims about DMS and other molecules. "The [JWST] telescope is incredibly powerful, but the signals we're detecting are very small. As a community, we have to make sure that any claims we make about a planet’s composition are robust to the choices made when processing the data from the telescope," said Piaulet-Ghorayeb.

"Researchers have the responsibility to double-check and verify, but the media is also responsible for duly reporting these follow-up works to the general public," added Luque. "Even if they have less catchy titles."

"As Carl Sagan once said, 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,'" said Luque. "That threshold was not met by how the results were disseminated to the general public."

Whether we'll ever get a clear answer about life on K2-18 b is uncertain — not just because of technological limits, but because the case for follow-ups with the JWST may simply not be strong enough. "JWST is continuing to observe K2-18b, and even though the new observations won't have the ability to detect life, we will soon find out more about the planet's atmosphere and interior," Zhang said.

Humanity's ability to image the heavens has improved by leaps and bounds since the invention of the telescope in 1608. Although the earliest of these images were far from clear, astronomers from generations ago could already observe craters on our moon, identify four of Jupiter's moons, and reveal a diffuse ribbon of light arching across the sky — what we now know represents the Milky Way's structure.

But modern telescopes, like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), have really brought the field forward. For instance, telescopes these days rely on very sophisticated instruments called coronagraphs to observe light coming from objects orbiting bright stars. "Current leading coronagraphs, such as the vortex and PIAA coronagraphs, are ingenious designs," Nico Deshler, a Ph.D. student at the University of Arizona and co-author of the new study, told Space.com.

"A coronagraph is an instrument used in astronomy to block or suppress the light coming from a very bright object, like a star, to reveal fainter objects surrounding it." This allows scientists to detect objects more than a billion times fainter than the stars they orbit.

However, Deshler and his colleagues believe they can push coronagraphs further to capture direct images of distant worlds. "Our team is broadly interested in the fundamental limits of sensing and metrology imposed by quantum mechanics, particularly in the context of imaging applications," Itay Ozer, a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland and another of the study’s co-authors, told Space.com.

The idea is to use principles of quantum mechanics to surpass the resolution limits of current telescopes, allowing scientists to image objects smaller or closer together than what traditional optics would permit.

"The resolution of a telescope generally describes the smallest feature that the telescope can faithfully capture," said Ozer. "This smallest length scale, dubbed the 'diffraction limit,' is related to the wavelength of the detected light divided by the diameter of the telescope."

This means gaining higher resolution requires building larger telescopes. However, launching a telescope large enough to surpass the diffraction limit necessary to directly image an exoplanet poses different types of challenges: high launch costs and extreme engineering complexity.

"In this regard, developing sub-diffraction imaging methods is an important pursuit because it allows us to expand the domain of accessible exoplanets given the challenges and constraints associated with space-based observation," added Deshler. "We were inspired to explore the implications of these newfound quantum information-theoretic limits in the context of sub-diffraction exoplanet imaging where many Earth-like exoplanets are suspected to reside."

The team thus designed a "quantum-level" coronagraph that can sort the light collected by a telescope and isolate the faint signal from exoplanets — light that is usually overwhelmed by the glare of their host stars.

The concept relies on the fact that photons, or particles of light, travel in different patterns known as spatial modes. "In astronomical imaging, the position of each light source in the field of view of a telescope excites different optical spatial modes," explained Ozer.

By using an optical device called a "spatial mode sorter," which is a cascade of carefully designed diffractive phase masks, the team was able to separate the incoming light, allowing them to isolate photons coming specifically from the exoplanet below the sub-diffraction limit. "As light interacts with each mask and propagates downstream through the mode sorter," said Deshler, "the optical field interferes with itself in such a way that the photons in each spatial mode get physically routed to different non-overlapping regions of space."

"The correspondence between the positions of light sources and their corresponding excited spatial modes is central to […] nulling of starlight and detection of exoplanets," added Ozer. "In this way, we are able to siphon the photons emitted by the star away from the photons emitted by the exoplanet."

This goes beyond digitally processing an image and subtracts starlight after the fact — in other words, it removes starlight in the optical domain before the light even reaches a detector. "In exoplanet searches, a telescope is rotated to point directly at a prospective star, which we model as a point source of light," explained Deshler. "Under this alignment between the star and the telescope axis, all the photons emanating from the star couple to the [telescope’s] fundamental mode — the specific spatial mode that is excited when looking at an on-axis point source."

Under this alignment, all the photons emanating from the star couple to the fundamental mode. By filtering out this mode, Deshler, Ozer and their colleagues were able to effectively eliminate the starlight, revealing only the light from the exoplanet.

"The exoplanet's light is misaligned to the telescope axis, and excites a different spatial mode from the star,” said Ozer. "Our method preserves as much of the pristine uncontaminated photons from the exoplanet as possible, which turn out to carry all the available information."

In the lab, the team set out to show that their device could detect exoplanets positioned extremely close to their host stars — closer than traditional resolution limits allow. They tested it using two points of light: a bright one to represent the star and a much dimmer one to simulate an exoplanet. By gradually moving the dimmer light and recording the resulting images, they assessed how well the device could localize the exoplanet.

They found that when the artificial exoplanet was very close to the star — less than one-tenth the separation limit of current telescopes — most of its photons were filtered out along with the starlight. At larger separations, however, the exoplanet's signal became clearer, rising above background noise and aligning with theoretical predictions.

Additionally, by setting the star to be 1,000 times brighter than the planet and analyzing the images with a maximum likelihood estimator, the team achieved results within a few percent of the theoretical limit across a wide range of sub-diffraction planet positions.

"This is a proof-of-principle demonstration that spatial mode sorting coronagraphs may provide access to deeply sub-diffraction exoplanets which lie beyond reach for current state-of-the-art systems," said Deshler. "We are hopeful that this method might allow astronomers to push the boundaries of exoplanets accessible with direct imaging."

The team says the technology needed to build and implement their quantum-optimized coronagraph already exists. They're now working to refine the device into a deployable system that meets performance targets.

"The main limitation is the fidelity of the mode sorter," explained Ozer. "In the lab, we measure the 'purity' of the modes through a metric called the cross-talk matrix, which describes the undesired photon leakage that occurs between independent modes. Cross-talk is largely induced by manufacturing imperfections and small experimental misalignments. To successfully image Exo-Earths, […] the mode sorter must isolate each photon in the fundamental mode to better than one part in a billion if the exoplanet is to be resolved."

The team says precision manufacturing is necessary to fabricate high-quality phase masks that can meet these "cross-talk" requirements. "We envision the use of advanced techniques, such as photolithography, additive manufacturing, or micromachining, to construct extremely precise diffractive surfaces," Deshler said.

The duo hopes this technology will one day provide complementary data for future flagship telescope missions like the Habitable Worlds Observatory, a proposed successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the JWST, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

"Direct imaging is one of the few observation strategies that can measure the wavelength spectrum of an exoplanet," explained Ozer. "In turn this spectrum may contain clues about atmospheric composition of an exoplanet and reveal potential chemical biosignatures."

"We imagine that mode-sorter driven coronagraphs could augment the astronomy toolkit and enable better characterization of sub-diffraction exoplanets," added Deshler. "However, the difficulty of exoplanet discovery warrants cross-validation with a multiplicity of observational techniques such as transits, velocimetry, and gravitational microlensing. Therefore, this technology is by no means a one-size-fits-all solution."

The study was published on April 22 in the journal Optica.

Like the Kuiper Belt in our solar system, this extraterrestrial debris disk is likely filled with comets, dwarf planets and a lot of water-ice particles chipped off larger bodies as the result of collisions. The debris disk, also like our Kuiper Belt, is made up of remnants of a larger disk that once encircled the star — called HD 181327 — and probably gave birth to planets. To be clear, however, no planets in the region have been detected thus far.

Because water is one of the most common molecules in the universe, its presence in HD 181327's debris disk is not a surprise. Indeed, exocomets have been detected around other stars; in our solar system, comets come from the frigid, icy Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, so exocomets must originate from somewhere similar.

However, while debris disks around other stars have been known about and imaged ever since the Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS) found debris disks around two nearby stars (Vega and beta Pictoris) a while back, we've not had an instrument able to detect water-ice within them until now.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and its Near-Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSpec), astronomers led by Chen Xie of Johns Hopkins University in the United States probed the debris disk around HD 181327. The star and its debris disk have previously been well-studied. Located 155.6 light-years away, they are just 18.5 million years old. This is extremely young compared to our sun's age of 4.6 billion years. The star is an F-type, meaning it's a little hotter and slightly more massive than our sun.

NIRSpec detected the signature water in HD 181327's spectrum, principally at a wavelength of 3 microns (millionths of a meter), with a peak coming at 3.1 microns. This spike in the spectrum, referred to as a "Fresnel peak," is caused by the refraction of light by water-ice particles that are just millimeters in size. This is similar in size to the icy particles in Saturn's rings, for example, and the ice is likely frozen around motes of interplanetary dust.

"Basically, we detected a water–ice reservoir," Xie told Space.com.

This water–ice reservoir could be instrumental in the development of any planetary system that might exist around HD 181327. Gas giant planets, for example, form beyond a boundary called the snow line, which is the distance from a star where temperatures are cold enough for planet-forming material to contain water-ice. Water-ice helps material stick together in a giant kind of mush that can form the basis of a large, rocky planetary core that can then pull in gas to form the distended atmosphere of a giant planet.

The water on terrestrial planets such as Earth also likely was delivered by asteroids and/or comets that formed beyond the snow line and are rich in water-ice. Therefore, the discovery of water-ice in HD 181327's debris disk means the materials are present there to aid in the development of any planets orbiting the star, although at this time no planets have yet been detected in the system.

"The presence of a water-ice reservoir in the planetesimal belt around HD 181327 provides the potential to deliver water to nearby planets," said Xie. "But we don't know how much water-ice could eventually be delivered to the planets in the system."

It's tempting to make comparisons between our Kuiper Belt and HD 181327's debris disk. Xie warns about being too literal in the comparison, though, because there are significant gaps in our knowledge of both icy belts and how they relate to each other. Nevertheless, we can draw some general conclusions.

"The presence of water-ice in a debris disk around such a young star does suggest that icy planetesimals can form relatively quickly, so it's possible that icy bodies in our own Kuiper Belt could have formed early in the cold outer regions of the solar system," he said. Their early existence could have then helped in the development of the solar system's planets.

However, the planet-forming disk around HD 181327 has now dissipated, and any planets that are present will have already formed. Furthermore, the JWST's observations show how the inner region of the debris disk is being eroded by the star's ultraviolet light. The strength of the spectral line for water-ice at the inner edge of the debris disk, 80 to 90 astronomical units (meaning 80 to 90 times Earth's distance from the sun), suggests water-ice makes up just 0.1% of the total mass in that part of the disk. Farther out, between 90 and 105 astronomical units, the water-ice mass fraction rises to 7.5%, and between 105 and 120 astronomical units it peaks at 21%, out where it is coldest. Coincidentally, the Fresnel peak is found between 90 and 105 astronomical units.

So, what's going on? Ultraviolet light from the star is able to vaporize the water-ice, but something seems to be replenishing it — otherwise, the water-ice in the debris disk would have eroded away by now.

This replenishment likely comes from collisions between dwarf planets, cometary nuclei, micrometeoroids and other flotsam and jetsam lurking in the dark of the debris disk. Each impact sputters more dust and ice grains into space, and each large impact sends a shower of fragments spinning away. If there's enough dust present, it could also shield water-ice from the star's ultraviolet light. Dust that has been detected already includes grains of olivine and iron sulfide.

Meanwhile, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), which is a radio telescope in Chile, has detected carbon monoxide in the debris disk, which could also have been released into space by collisions between icy bodies. In addition, the JWST's NIRSpec found tentative evidence for the presence of carbon dioxide in the region of the disk between 105 and 120 astronomical units from the star, although this still needs to be confirmed. A second spectral line for water-ice, at 4.5 microns, was also detected by the JWST in the 105 to 120 astronomical-unit region, indicating this outer part of the debris disk might be the most rich in volatiles: gases with low evaporation points.

Now that the JWST has demonstrated that it can detect water-ice in exoplanetary systems, we can expect more widespread discoveries in the future. Indeed, Xie and his team are already working on it.

"Besides HD 181327, we have also observed other systems with the JWST and NIRSPec," he said. "We're currently working on publishing those data, so stay tuned!"

The discovery of water-ice around HD 181327 was published on May 14 in the journal Nature.

A team of scientists pointed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at Titan in November of 2022 and July of 2023. With some help from the twin telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory on the dormant Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii, the JWST found evidence of cloud convection, the process through which warmer air rises and brings moisture upward to form clouds. Clouds have been seen in Titan's southern hemisphere before, but never in the northern hemisphere, where most of the moon's seas and lakes are found.

Titan has lakes and seas of liquid methane, and the moon features dynamic weather patterns just like our own planet does. That makes it unique among all of the other celestial bodies in our cosmic neighborhood, scientists say. "Titan is the only other place in our solar system that has weather like Earth, in the sense that it has clouds and rainfall onto a surface," said Conor Nixon of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and lead author of a new study about Titan's weather, in a statement.

These new observations of Titan were made during the moon's summer season. NASA's Cassini–Huygens spacecraft studied Titan between 2004 and 2017 and observed cloud convection during late summer months in the southern hemisphere, but this new study is the first to watch this phenomenon during summer in Titan's northern hemisphere.

Scientists say the new data could help solve some of the outstanding mysteries about Titan. "Together with ground-based observations, Webb is giving us precious new insights into Titan's atmosphere, that we hope to be able to investigate much closer-up in the future with a possible ESA mission to visit the Saturn system," said the European Space Agency's Thomas Cornet, a co-author of the new study.

In addition to watching clouds form in the moon's northern hemisphere, the data gathered by the JWST's observations of Titan also helped identify a "key missing piece" of the moon's chemistry: a new organic molecule known as a methyl radical that has a "free," or unbonded, electron.

Because the lakes and seas on Titan are filled with methane, this compound is a key component of many of the moon's chemical processes. Sunlight and electrons from nearby Saturn split methane molecules in Titan's atmosphere, where they then combine with other molecules to make more complex substances.

Scientists are thrilled about this discovery of methyl radical in Titan's atmosphere, as it offers a window into these active chemical processes as they occur.

"For the first time we can see the chemical cake while it's rising in the oven, instead of just the starting ingredients of flour and sugar, and then the final, iced cake," said astrochemist and study co-author Stefanie Milam of the Goddard Space Flight Center, in a NASA statement.

But the story won't end here, as scientists still want to know more about Titan and its chemistry. While the Cassini-Huygens mission revealed a great deal about the moon, nothing can surpass actually sending a spacecraft onto the moon itself to perform in-situ, or on-location, science.

To accomplish this, NASA is planning the ambitious Dragonfly mission, which will send a nuclear-powered octocopter onto the surface of Titan, where it will spend three years "hopping" from location to location and studying the moon's chemistry. Dragonfly is scheduled to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in 2028, and reach the Titan in 2034, if all goes according to plan.

Dragonfly recently passed its Critical Design Review test, meaning it can now move on to being manufactured. The explorer will study Titan's potential habitability, seeking out signs of prebiotic chemistry as well as keeping a robotic eye out for any signs of life.

A study of the summer atmosphere of Titan's northern hemisphere has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The James Webb Space Telescope has observed glowing auroras on Jupiter like never before.

Scientists pointed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at Jupiter on Dec. 25, 2023 and captured auroras adorning the gas giant's north pole. Like the northern lights on Earth, Jupiter's auroras are created when high-energy particles blown from the sun — via its solar wind — reach the planet's upper atmosphere and get funneled toward its poles by the planet's magnetic field.

However, when it comes to Jupiter, this world's auroras have another way of forming, too.  According to a JWST team statement, particles ejected from volcanoes on the gas giant's hellish moon Io can undergo that same process. Jupiter's auroras have another key difference than those on our planet, too: they glow hundreds of times brighter than Earth's.

As scientists gathered data about these auroras on Christmas Day 2023, they were stunned by how dynamic and intense they were.

"What a Christmas present it was — it just blew me away!" the University of Leicester's Jonathan Nichols, who specializes in studying planetary auroras and is lead author on a new study of Jupiter's auroras, said in the statement.

"We wanted to see how quickly the auroras change, expecting them to fade in and out ponderously, perhaps over a quarter of an hour or so. Instead, we observed the whole auroral region fizzing and popping with light, sometimes varying by the second."

Using both the JWST's NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument and ultraviolet sensors on the Hubble Telescope, Nichols and his team were able to capture new details in Jupiter's crackling auroras.

What they saw was surprising.

"Bizarrely, the brightest light observed by Webb had no real counterpart in Hubble's pictures. This has left us scratching our heads," Nichols said in the statement.

"In order to cause the combination of brightness seen by both Webb and Hubble, we need to have a combination of high quantities of very low-energy particles hitting the atmosphere, which was previously thought to be impossible. We still don't understand how this happens."

The James Webb Space Telescope previously captured Jupiter's auroras in 2022, watching them glow at high altitudes at the gas giant's poles. The images also showed faint rings around Jupiter and two of its smaller moons, Amalthea and Adrastea.

Nichols and his fellow researchers plan to continue studying this phenomenon using both Hubble and the JWST to try and better understand how the suspected combination of particles might be reaching Jupiter's atmosphere. The insights gained could reveal new details about Jupiter's magnetosphere, the region of space around the planet affected by its magnetic field.

A new study of Jupiter's auroras was published May 12 in the journal Nature Communications.

Through the citizen science project, called Galaxy Zoo (part of the Zooniverse platform), volunteers can help astronomers analyze over 500,000 JWST images to identify the shapes of galaxies and how they have changed over time. This, in turn, contributes to our understanding of the evolution of the universe, according to a statement from NASA.

"This is a great opportunity to see images from the newest space telescope," Christine Macmillan, a Galaxy Zoo project volunteer from Aberdeen, Scotland, said in the statement. "Galaxies at the edge of our universe are being seen for the first time, just as they are starting to form. Just sign up and answer simple questions about the shape of the galaxy that you are seeing. Anyone can do it, ages 10 and up!"

With its advanced infrared capabilities, JWST has provided an unprecedented view of the cosmos, revealing galaxies at greater distances than ever before. The space telescope is able to see distant objects as they appeared billions of years ago, offering insights into the early stages of galaxy formation, star birth and the processes that have shaped the cosmos over time.

Images taken by JWST are uploaded to Galaxy Zoo, which uses an AI algorithm called ZooBot to identify those that are easier for volunteers to analyze. As part of the project, participants are asked a series of questions to help classify the shape, structure and features of a galaxy presented in an image on screen.

"I'm amazed and honored to be one of the first people to actually see these images!" Elisabeth Baeten, a Galaxy Zoo project volunteer from Leuven, Belgium, said in the statement. "What a privilege!"

Anyone interested in helping NASA classify galaxy images can visit the online Galaxy Zoo platform.

That exotic world is TOI-421 b, a boiling-hot "sub-Neptune" orbiting a star about 244 light-years from Earth whose atmosphere JWST recently probed in detail.

"One of the most exciting prospects in exoplanet science today is discovering the origin and makeup of sub-Neptunes, which are high-occurrence planets that have no solar system analog," the study team wrote in their paper, which was published Monday (May 5) in The Astronomical Journal Letters.

Although JWST was specifically designed for this kind of investigation, the discovery is particularly exciting because little is known about this class of planets, which were first identified by NASA's pioneering Kepler space telescope. Before JWST, attempts to study the atmospheres of sub-Neptune planets using transmission spectra — the measurement of starlight filtered through a planet's atmosphere when it passes in front of its host star — often yielded flat or featureless spectra.

So, rather than showing chemical fingerprints that could indicate the presence of atmospheric molecules like carbon dioxide, methane or water vapor, the spectra of sub-Neptunes have generally offered little useful information. Astronomers proposed that this lack of detail might be due to clouds or hazes, which could be obscuring the signals.

But the study team thought that TOI-421 b might be different, and could therefore offer a unique opportunity.

"Why did we observe this planet, TOI-421 b? It's because we thought that maybe it wouldn't have hazes," principal investigator Eliza Kempton, a professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland, said in a statement. "And the reason is that there were some previous data that implied that maybe [sub-Neptune] planets over a certain temperature range were less enshrouded by haze or clouds than others."

Previous observations with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope had shown that flat spectral features are common among sub-Neptunes with temperatures below about 1,070 degrees Fahrenheit (577 degrees Celsius).

"Sub-Neptunes hotter [than this threshold] are also expected to be haze free because methane, and thus the hydrocarbon precursors to haze formation, should be less abundant as carbon monoxide becomes the dominant carbon-bearing molecule," the team wrote in the new study.

TOI-421 b, with an estimated atmospheric temperature of 1,340 degrees Fahrenheit (727 degrees C), falls into this potentially haze-free category — and, after observing two transits using JWST's Near Infrared Spectrograph and Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph instruments, the team was rewarded with a rich atmospheric profile.

"We saw spectral features that we attribute to various gases, and that allowed us to determine the composition of the atmosphere," Brian Davenport, a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland who conducted the primary data analysis, said in the same statement.

The team detected water vapor in TOI-421 b's atmosphere, along with possible signs of carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide. Notably, they did not find evidence of methane or carbon dioxide. The data also suggest that the atmosphere contains a significant amount of hydrogen.

Some of these findings are surprising, challenging existing theories about the formation and evolution of sub-Neptune planets.

"We had recently wrapped our mind around the idea that those first few sub-Neptunes observed by Webb had heavy-molecule atmospheres, so that had become our expectation, and then we found the opposite," said Kempton. This means TOI-421 b may have formed and evolved differently than cooler sub-Neptunes, such as TOI-270 d, which was observed previously.

The hydrogen-rich atmosphere is especially intriguing because it closely mirrors the composition of TOI-421 b's host star.

"If you just took the same gas that made the host star, plopped it on top of a planet's atmosphere, and put it at the much cooler temperature of this planet, you would get the same combination of gases," Kempton said. "That process is more in line with the giant planets in our solar system, and it is different from other sub-Neptunes that have been observed with Webb so far."

"I had been waiting my entire career for Webb so that we could meaningfully characterize the atmospheres of these smaller planets," she continued. "By studying their atmospheres, we're getting a better understanding of how sub-Neptunes formed and evolved, and part of that is understanding why they don't exist in our solar system."

The James Webb Space Telescope's observations of the exoplanet, named WD 1856+534 b, also confirm it is the coldest exoplanet to date, which could pave the way for the first detailed atmospheric studies of gas giant exoplanets and help us contextualize our solar system on a cosmic scale.

"We were all a bit surprised — and excited — to find that it was, in fact, a planet, and a really cold one at that," Mary Anne Limbach, an astronomer at the University of Michigan, who led the new study, told Space.com.

WD 1856+534 b, a Jupiter-size world located about 80 light-years from Earth, was first discovered in 2020. It orbits a white dwarf — the remnant core of a once sun-like star — every 1.4 days. Initially, scientists were unsure whether the object was a planet or a brown dwarf, the so-called "failed stars" of the universe, because they only had limited temperature data about it from the now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope. New data from the JWST, however, have now provided far more sensitive measurements, enabling astronomers to directly detect the planet's light and measure its mass and temperature.

The results confirmed that WD 1856+534 b is indeed a planet.

What makes this confirmation especially intriguing is the planet's survival in the so-called "forbidden zone" of its star — a region so close to the white dwarf that any world within should have been destroyed when the star expanded during its red giant phase, growing to many times its original size before shrinking into its current, dense, Earth-size form.

"This is compelling evidence that planets can not only survive the violent death of their star, but also move into orbits where we didn't previously necessarily expect them to exist," said Limbach. Beyond refining models of planetary evolution, the findings suggest that such migration might be key to moving planets into the "habitable zones" of white dwarfs where life as we know it could emerge.

"It's a fascinating process, and this confirmation gives us the first observational proof that it can happen," Limbach said.

At a frigid -125 degrees Fahrenheit (-87 degrees Celsius), WD 1856+534 b is the coldest planet ever directly observed, surpassing the previous record-holder, Epsilon Indi Ab, which stands at around 35 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius).

While the JWST hasn't yet reached its theoretical capability of detecting planets as cold as -324.67 degrees Fahrenheit (-198.15 degrees Celsius), upcoming programs aim to reach that threshold. And, if all goes to plan, those forthcoming data would accelerate detections of temperatures, ages and masses of exoplanets similar to Jupiter and Saturn.

"That's a big step forward," said Limbach. "It's a rare opportunity to place our own solar system in a broader galactic context."

Limbach and her team plan to conduct a second JWST observation of the WD 1856+534 system this July. By comparing the system's position to background stars a year after the initial observation, researchers hope to spot any additional planets that might be gravitationally bound to the star.

Detecting another planet could explain how WD 1856+534 b migrated to its current close orbit around the white dwarf. Even if no other planets are found, the follow-up data will help astronomers narrow down other possible explanations of how worlds like WD 1856+534b end up orbiting white dwarfs at such a close range, said Limbach.

"Either way, it's a crucial next step in figuring out how these systems evolve."

This research is detailed in a preprint paper posted to the archive arXiv that has yet to be peer reviewed.

These ancient minor planets are called trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), and they date back to the formation of the solar system.

Researchers participating in the Discovering the Surface Compositions of Trans-Neptunian Objects program, led by the University of Central Florida (UCF), recently studied these dim objects using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Their work has revealed new information about surface ice methanol — a key building block for organic compounds necessary for life, including sugars — on TNOs.

"Methanol, a simple alcohol, has been found on comets and distant TNOs, hinting that it may be a primitive ingredient inherited from the early days of our solar system — or even from interstellar space," former UCF professor Noemí Pinilla-Alonso, who now works at Spain's University of Oviedo, said in a statement.

“But methanol is more than just a leftover from the past," Pinilla-Alonso added. "When exposed to radiation, it transforms into new compounds, acting as a chemical time capsule that reveals how these icy worlds have evolved over billions of years."

The Webb observations identified two groups of TNOs: one with depleted surface ice methanol and one with subsurface methanol reservoirs.

"What excited me the most was realizing that these differences were linked to the behavior of methanol — a key ingredient that had long been elusive on TNOs from Earth-based observations," said Pinilla-Alonso. "Our findings suggest that methanol is being destroyed on the surface of TNOs by irradiation, but remains more abundant in the subsurface, protected from this exposure."

While this discovery might not provide all answers about the origins and development of TNOs, it certainly furthers our understanding of these distant icy bodies — and inspires more research.

The findings were published in March in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) team shared a new image of a region of the sky called the COSMOS-Web field (short for Cosmic Evolution Survey). The image combines data collected by JWST's Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) and the Hubble Space Telescope to create a "visual feast of galaxies," according to a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA). (ESA partners with NASA on the Hubble mission.)

The image contains a striking number of cosmic objects, ranging from stars within our own Milky Way galaxy, marked by diffraction spikes, to galaxies located billions of light-years away that serve as relics of the early universe.

In addition, the image captures the most massive group of galaxies in the COSMOS-Web field. This group can be seen just below the center of the image as white-gold glowing points of light. We see this group as it appeared when the universe was 6.5 billion years old, which is less than half its current age.

"More than half of the galaxies in our universe belong to galaxy groups like the one pictured here," ESA officials said in the statement. "Studying galaxy groups is critical for understanding how individual galaxies link up to form galaxy clusters, the largest gravitationally bound structures in the universe. Being part of a galaxy group can also alter the course of a galaxy's evolution through mergers and gravitational interactions."

The COSMOS-Web project aims to map the earliest structures of the universe and has observed galaxy groups as far back as when the universe was only 1.9 billion years old — just 14% of its current age.

The variety of objects captured in the new image includes a cosmic "buffet" of galaxies exhibiting features ranging from delicate spiral arms to warped disks and irregular structures signifying a recent collision or merger. The different colors highlight the objects' vast age range — younger stars appear bluer and older stars appear redder — and distance from Earth, as galaxies located further away appear more red, according to the statement.

It's surprising any light from distant galaxy JADES-GS-Z13-1-LA reached Earth at all. Photons coming from the realm that recently landed on the James Webb Space Telescope's mirrors existed when the universe was just 330 million years old — and, at that point in its adolescence, the universe was foggy and dim. A dense haze of gas suffused the space between stars, and even between galaxies, absorbing starlight and muffling the whole universe in darkness.

Astronomers call this period the Cosmic Dark Ages, and JADES-GS-Z13-1-LA is the earliest light we've seen (so far) piercing that cosmic fog.

Shedding light on a big moment for the universe

More than 13.5 billion years ago, JADES-GS-Z13-1-LA blazed brightly in ultraviolet light — but as that light crossed billions of light-years between its home galaxy and the Milky Way (which were moving farther apart the whole time, thanks to the fact that the universe is still expanding in the wake of the Big Bang, so everything is still getting farther apart from everything else), its waves stretched out.

As a result, the distant galaxy's ultraviolet light had become infrared light by the time it reached the Milky Way.

Infrared is invisible to humans, but it's indeed visible to the sensitive instruments aboard the JWST, like the Near-Infrared Camera, Near-Infrared Spectrometer, and Mid-Infrared Instrument.

University of Copenhagen astrophysicist Joris Witstok and his colleagues used data from those instruments to shed light on a mysterious period in our universe's distant past: the Epoch of Reionization. Also known as Cosmic Dawn, this was the moment when the light of the first galaxies began to clear away the dense fog that had filled the universe — and absorbed ultraviolet light — around 400,000 years after the Big Bang.

JADES-GS-Z13-1-LA is right on the cusp of that crucial moment in our universe's history. It's among the pioneers of reionization and one of the oldest galaxies we can actually see. And that means it can teach physicists about how that process happened and how the earliest galaxies evolved.

"I think one of the most intriguing questions about reionization is whether we can pinpoint the very first moment it started across the Universe," Witstok told Space.com, "which should coincide with the formation of the first generation of stars."

From cosmic dark ages to cosmic dawn

By around 300 million years after the Big Bang, the first stars had coalesced from the universe's primordial cloud of matter. Nuclear fusion deep inside these stars was churning out the very first starlight of the cosmos. At the same time, a dense fog of hydrogen gas with a little helium mixed in filled the universe and absorbed the starlight.

The Cosmic Dark Ages were in full swing.

The all-pervading fog formed as the universe slowly cooled down from the tremendous heat and pressure of the Big Bang. At first, all the matter that had burst into existence with the Big Bang was bouncing around in the form of positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons (well, the protons had probably started as quarks, which eventually stuck together to make protons).

Those particles eventually slowed down enough to catch hold of each other and form atoms. Together, those atoms made up a thick haze of hydrogen and helium, exhibiting no electrical charge. That dense, neutral fog absorbed ultraviolet light and acted like a cosmic blackout curtain hung between the galaxies. But ultraviolet radiation changed the cloud itself in the process, knocking electrons off atoms and giving the gas an electric charge (or ionizing it, as physicists would say).

Ionized gas, also called plasma, absorbs energy differently than neutral gas does, so galaxies' light at that time had begun to pierce the veil.

Light from JADES-GS-Z13-1-LA would have created a bubble of reionized plasma around itself. And, by the time the light passed beyond the bounds of that bubble — about 650,000 light-years, according to Witstok — its wavelengths would have stretched enough that at least some of it would have been able to pass through the intergalactic cloud.

University of Melbourne astrophysicist Michele Trenti, who was not involved in the study, tells Space.com she's curious about how those bubbles of plasma grew and overlapped over time during the Epoch of Reionization, until the whole universe was eventually reionized — and transparent.

Massive stars or a supermassive black hole?

Witstok and his colleagues noticed that the light from JADES-GS-Z13-1-LA looked bluer than they expected (meaning that more of it came from the shorter-wavelength end of the electromagnetic spectrum). The galaxy is also giving off a surprising amount of a type of light called Lyman-α radiation. This Lyman-α radiation happens when neutral hydrogen gets a blast of ultraviolet radiation, which excites its electron. As the electron settles back down, it lets off that energy as Lyman-α radiation.

The presence of so much Lyman-α in the galaxy's spectrum suggests it's bombarding the surrounding hydrogen with a lot of ultraviolet radiation.

"These two facts combined make the galaxy unique (and therefore surprising)," says Trenti, "and [they're] inconsistent with expectations from typical galaxies we see at the end of reionization [around 0.8 billion to 1 billion years after the Big Bang]."

Explaining the galaxy's surprisingly energetic glow requires something else surprising: Either JADES-GS-Z13-1-LA is bustling with unusually massive, hot blue stars, or it has an unusually huge supermassive black hole at its center that's actively gobbling up gas.

If we're seeing the light from the galaxy's billions of stars, those stars would have to be huge and hot: about 15 times hotter than the sun, and more than a hundred times more massive.

On the other hand, if we're seeing the light from a voraciously feeding supermassive black hole, it would have to be even more massive than the one at the heart of our Milky Way, which boasts the mass of about 4 million suns. For most of the models of how galaxies (and the supermassive black holes at their centers) formed and grew, that's a shocking idea: so early in our universe's history, no supermassive black hole should have had time to grow to such a gargantuan size.

"There are certain theoretical models where this would be expected though, so if this were the case it could have very important implications for such theories for early black hole formation," says Witstok.

For Trenti, this is one of the most interesting questions about the Epoch of Reionization: "What are the sources of radiation that contribute to reionization? Is the process driven by normal stars, exotic stars, or accreting black holes?"

The answer could tell us something about how early galaxies formed and evolved into ones like our Milky Way and its thoroughly modern neighbors.

A cosmic mystery remains — for now

But Witstok and his colleagues still don't have enough information to solve that particular mystery.

"This discovery starts shining some light on when reionization started, but it is just a preview that stirs curiosity, it is hard to do science with a sample of only one object," said Trenti.

Witstok agrees, but he's optimistic about finding more galaxies from the cusp of the Epoch of Reionization – and so far, JWST has been pushing the boundaries of how far back in time astronomers can see.

"I'm sure over the next years we will find examples of even more distant galaxies with similar characteristics,” Witstok said. "The next steps include investigating this galaxy in more detail, with new observations already having been obtained and more scheduled to be taken in the near future, but also finding more examples of galaxies with very bright Lyman-α radiation very early on."

If astronomers can get more detailed measurements of the spectrum of light coming from the galaxy, they may be able to measure how much helium, oxygen and carbon are involved in producing the light. That will let them compare JWST’s measurements to computer models of the physics involved and see which explanation best matches the data.

The study was published on March 26 in the journal Nature.

Cosmic noon is a mysterious period of the universe's evolution, around 2 billion to 3 billion years after the Big Bang, when galaxies like the Milky Way were rapidly forming stars in a process called "starburst." This growth through star formation was so intense that the team behind this research thinks half of all stars seen in modern galaxies originated during cosmic noon.

The team conducted the MIRI EGS Galaxy and AGN (MEGA) survey with the James Webb Space Telescope to better understand this crucial epoch in the universe's 13.8-billion-year history.

"We want to understand how these galaxies are forming stars, how many stars they're forming, and especially how the black holes at their centers are growing," project principal investigator and KU researcher Allison Kirkpatrick said in a statement. "Our goal with this project is to conduct the largest JWST survey in the mid-infrared across multiple bandwidths."

These cosmic noon galaxies are shrouded in thick clouds of dust, which efficiently absorb visible light, making them difficult to study. However, the dusty shrouds are less adept at absorbing infrared light, making the JWST the ideal instrument to peer deeper into these early galaxies than ever before.

"The mid-infrared is where dust emits, so we’re looking at dust-obscured galaxies," Kirkpatrick said. "Dust hides many things, and we want to peer behind the dust."

Exploring the Extended Groth Strip

The team applied the JWST's infrared observing power to a galaxy-rich strip of space located near the constellation of Ursa Major, called the Extended Groth Strip.

"The Extended Groth Strip is a region of the sky that has now become one of the premier JWST fields,” Kirkpatrick said. “Within this region, we're able to see about 10,000 galaxies — even though the area is only roughly the diameter of the moon."

Kirkpatrick and colleagues used the Extended Groth Strip as a hunting ground for galaxies with ravenously feeding and thus rapidly growing supermassive black holes at their hearts.

Though black holes themselves emit no light, their immense gravitational influence generates friction in the material that swirls around them. This heats that material to tremendously high temperatures, causing these regions called "active galactic nuclei," or "AGNs," to glow brightly.

The theory is that some of the AGN-hosting galaxies seen for the first time in infrared in the MEGA data are ancestors of Milky Way-like galaxies. That means measuring how fast their black holes feed, how rapidly they birth stars, and how their appearance changes due to mergers and collisions with other galaxies could eventually provide unprecedented information about our own galaxy's formative era.

Collecting and processing this data has been a painstaking process, and it's actually one you too can assist with.

How can you get an early look at JWST images?

The KU team's investigation turned up a vast amount of data and raw images, which the team scoured to produce usable images and information.

"In theory, a galaxy could show up in one image and not another because we're using different filters," team member and KU researcher Bren Backhaus said. "It's like taking pictures using only red, blue, or green light, which eventually creates very pretty images.

"But because the telescope is moving slightly, the images are a little out of frame with each other."

Backhaus added that the first step is simply receiving the images, with the next step involving correcting for known issues with the telescope.

"For example, there's a known scratch that appears in every image, and there are dead pixels," Backhaus explained. "The first task is to fix or at least tell the software to ignore those pixels.”

Backhaus and colleagues' next goal was to create a catalog by finding a measurable amount of light and recording how much of that light comes in through a given filter.

"That was my primary work with the data, and I was really excited because I had never worked with photometry data before," Backhaus said. "It really expanded my skill set, and I got to see beautiful galaxies before anyone else."

Thus far, the team's project has used the JWST for 67 hours, with a further 30 hours approved for the future. But the rest of the astronomical community will have to wait to lay their eyes on what the KU team describes as a "beautiful dataset."

"This is the largest amount of JWST data we've been able to bring to KU with a principal investigator here, which means KU students have exclusive use of this data for now," Kirkpatrick said. "It's not public yet. The way telescope time works is that, because so much effort goes into writing a proposal, you're given a year of exclusive use of the data. Then it gets released into a public database, but only as raw data.

"Anyone can access it, but they'd have to do their own processing, which has taken months in our case."

However, there is a way you could get early access to the MEGA images. Members of the public can classify the galaxies and help hunt mergers via the Cosmic Collisions Zooniverse project.

The team's research has been accepted for publication in the journal Astrophysical Journal and is available as a pre-peer reviewed paper on the repository site arXiv.

"Hubble is more scientifically productive now than ever before, which is kind of mind-blowing," Jennifer Wiseman, the Senior Project Scientist for Hubble at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Space.com.

Launched in 1990 by NASA and operated jointly with the European Space Agency, the Hubble Space Telescope was a dream brought to reality. All of a sudden, scientists could harness a large, multi-purpose observatory operating in orbit, beyond the blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere. Now a household name, Hubble has had a hand in many of the most crucial astronomical discoveries of the past four decades.

Hubble, for instance, confirmed that every large galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole at its heart and has kept a keen watch on the expanding remnant of supernova 1987A. Through Hubble's observations of Type Ia supernovas, astronomers discovered dark energy accelerating the expansion of the universe. Hubble's deep fields took humans further back in time than ever before when they were released, across 13 billion years of cosmic history. Hubble pioneered the study of exoplanetary atmospheres, and is still vital for keeping track of goings-on in the atmospheres of the outer giant planets of our solar system.

Yet, it has not all been smooth sailing for Hubble.

Saving Hubble

At times it has seemed like this space telescope has more lives than a cat.

After it first launched, scientists realized that one of Hubble's primary mirrors was ground to the wrong specification. As a result, a daring rescue mission was planned. Astronauts rode to Hubble in orbit aboard the space shuttle Endeavour and installed corrective optics in 1993, restoring the telescope's vision.

Hubble was actually designed to be serviced by visiting astronauts in this way; three more missions tended to the space telescope between 1997 and 2002, but the Columbia space shuttle disaster a year later cast doubt on future servicing missions. After the shuttle returned to flight, only enough space shuttle missions to complete construction of the International Space Station were initially planned before the shuttle fleet was to be retired. A final servicing mission to Hubble was deemed too risky — but with the ailing telescope’s instruments failing one by one, and its point-and-control system on its last legs, NASA was convinced to fly one more mission to save Hubble.

That mission flew in 2009 and it was the last time that astronauts visited the space telescope. New instruments were installed, old ones were replaced, and the observatory was given a general sprucing up. Its longevity from thereon was thought to depend upon how long its gyroscopes, vital for accurately pointing the telescope, could last. Hubble was installed with five gyroscopes; the received wisdom was that it needed at least three to operate correctly.

By 2024, only three gyroscopes were left functioning. Then, one of them started malfunctioning.

"It became very noisy and difficult to work with, and ultimately was disruptive to Hubble's observations," said Wiseman. It seemed like perhaps time had finally caught up with Hubble, but others on the ground thought otherwise.

"Our brilliant technical team came up with an ingenious way of honing Hubble's point-and-control system so that it only needs one gyroscope," said Wiseman. "This one-gyro mode is now working very well."

And so, Hubble survived.

Perhaps that is partly why Hubble is so loved, by both astronomers and the public: It has beaten the odds time and again to keep observing, and the tenacity of the telescope and its team can't help but be endearing.

The forefront of astronomical research

The other part of the reason why Hubble is so loved is the extraordinary science that it continues to produce, and at an increasing rate according to Wiseman. She defines Hubble's prodigious scientific productivity in terms of the sheer number of peer-reviewed research papers based, at least in part, on Hubble data that are being published.

So, with its youngest instruments now 16 years old, how does the venerable observatory remain at the forefront of astronomical research after so long? Despite those hiccups along the way, the gyroscope-fix exemplifies how Hubble has found a way to remain preternaturally young.

"Hubble is still in excellent technical condition, all its science instruments are in good shape and it looks like they will be for some years to come," said Wiseman, who credits the instruments' longevity to their careful maintenance and operation by the telescope's technical team on the ground at both NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI).

Take, for example, the telescope's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), which operates at ultraviolet wavelengths, probing star-formation to track the large-scale structure of the universe. Hubble's ultraviolet vision is precious — ultraviolet astronomy can only be conducted above Earth’s absorbing ozone, and Hubble is the only general-purpose ultraviolet facility currently in operation.

COS was installed in 2009, but "is still producing fantastic scientific results, in large part because the technical team on the ground is finding ways of preserving and extending the life of the sensitive detectors in the spectrograph and innovative ways of using different parts of the detector to keep it fresh," said Wiseman.

Teamwork

In addition, Hubble has always been a collaborative instrument, previously working in unison with NASA's now-defunct Spitzer Space Telescope, the still-active Chandra X-ray Observatory, and large observatories on the ground such as the Keck telescopes. One of the big reasons, however, for the current increase in scientific research projects for Hubble is that it now has two new and powerful partners in crime: the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and, of course, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Although, as Wiseman emphasizes, "Complementarity is just one reason why we're getting more science out of Hubble,"

For instance, because the JWST's vision extends into mid-infrared wavelengths, it is more adept at studying galaxies that existed close to the dawn of the universe, whose light has been greatly redshifted by the expansion of space. On the other hand, Hubble's optical and ultraviolet vision is more suited to studying the local, low-redshift universe. Star-forming regions produce lots of ultraviolet light from hot stars born within them, but for those galaxies near the dawn of time, cosmic expansion has stretched the ultraviolet light of star-forming regions well into the infrared regime.

"By using Hubble and Webb in complement, we can build a complete cosmic history by comparing what Hubble can see in detail in ultraviolet light in nearby galaxies with what Webb is seeing, and we can extrapolate and piece together different epochs of cosmic time based on what each see," said Wiseman.

The perspective of time

The final reason why we've reached peak Hubble is to do with the space telescope's longevity, which has allowed it to build up a deep and magnificent dataset stretching back 35 years.

The universe is not static; things change over time, whether it be cloud systems on the outer giant planets, stars that exploded, erratic and active black holes, or variable stars such as T Corona Borealis. By accessing Hubble's archives, which are readily available to everyone, scientists are now able to track long-period changes in these transient phenomena.

"These are some of the ways that scientists are using Hubble to make astounding new discoveries even this far into the mission," said Wiseman. "What's happening is that scientists are asking new questions that we couldn’t even ask before, but now that we have decades' worth of sensitive data it allows us to ask those questions about time-varying phenomena."

Still, Hubble won't last forever. Nothing ever does.

Assuming there's no change in the status of its instruments, the greatest danger to Hubble is atmospheric drag, which is slowly but surely slowing the space telescope's orbital velocity. It is expected to re-enter the atmosphere and burn up at some point in the 2030s.

"Losing Hubble will be an enormous loss to science," said Wiseman, "because Hubble has very unique capabilities that are currently unmatched."

The true successor to Hubble, able to operate in both ultraviolet and optical light with an eight-meter mirror at minimum, will not launch until the 2040s at the earliest. That could leave a gap without a flagship optical and ultraviolet space telescope — but Hubble's destiny is not yet determined.

Though it would be costly and, to some extent, risky in the sense that it hasn't been attempted before on such a scale, some have proposed that a future robotic mission could launch to Hubble, lock onto it, and fire a rocket to boost Hubble to a higher orbit and give it more years of science.

When the time comes, it would be handy if Hubble could pull just one more life out of its bag.

In 2023, researchers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reported the potential presence of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) on K2-18b, which is nearly nine times more massive than Earth and circles in the "habitable zone" of a star about 120 light-years away from us.

Here on Earth, DMS is produced primarily by life — most prolifically by phytoplankton and other marine microbes — so the 2023 study was met with some enthusiasm. The excitement was tempered, however, by the preliminary nature of the find; JWST's observations were consistent with the presence of DMS but did not confirm it. So the study team looked again, but in a slightly different way this time.

JWST can probe exoplanet atmospheres when these worlds "transit," or cross the face of, their host stars from the observatory's perspective: The telescope detects certain molecules in the air based on the wavelengths of starlight that they absorb.

Related: Does exoplanet K2-18b host alien life or not? Here's why the debate continues

The team made the original, tentative DMS detection using JWST's NIRISS (Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph) and NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instruments. For the new study, the researchers employed the $10 billion telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which scrutinizes different wavelengths of light.

MIRI also detected the fingerprint of DMS (and/or dimethyl disulfide, or DMDS, a close chemical cousin and also a potential biosignature), the researchers report in the new study, which was published online today (April 17) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"This is an independent line of evidence, using a different instrument than we did before and a different wavelength range of light, where there is no overlap with the previous observations," Nikku Madhusudhan, a professor at Cambridge University's Institute of Astronomy, who led both K2-18b studies, said in a statement today. "The signal came through strong and clear."

Based on its size and other characteristics, astronomers suspect that K2-18b may be a "Hycean" world — a class of exoplanet proposed in 2021 that has a huge liquid-water ocean and a hydrogen-rich atmosphere. ("Hycean" is a portmanteau of "hydrogen" and "ocean.")

And K2-18b's air is also rich in DMS and/or DMDS, according to the new study. The researchers estimate concentrations of more than 10 parts per million by volume, compared to less than one part per billion for them here on Earth.

"Earlier theoretical work had predicted that high levels of sulfur-based gases like DMS and DMDS are possible on Hycean worlds," Madhusudhan said. "And now we’ve observed it, in line with what was predicted. Given everything we know about this planet, a Hycean world with an ocean that is teeming with life is the scenario that best fits the data we have."

Madhusudhan and his team aren't claiming to have detected alien life; they say that more research is needed to confirm and extend their findings. Other scientists feel the same way — and some are injecting heavier doses of skepticism into the debate around K2-18b and its life-hosting potential.

One of them is astronomer Chris Lintott, who took issue with Madhusudhan's "strong and clear" characterization of the DMS/DMDS signal.

"Meanwhile, the peer-reviewed paper says 'While [the presence of molecules] DMDS and DMS best explains the current observations, their combined significance … is at the lower end of robustness required for scientific evidence," Lintott, an astrophysics professor at the University of Oxford, wrote on the social media site BlueSky yesterday (April 16).

Detecting signs of alien life is a tricky business, and confirming them is even tougher — especially on a world like K2-18b, which we won't be able to investigate up close for the foreseeable future, if ever. So we should expect the debate, and the data collection, to continue.

Previously, it was believed that galaxies like ours would take billions of years to form distinct features like spiral arms, vast star-forming disks, and central bulges of densely packed stars. Yet, rather than being the expected chaotic galactic blob, those well-ordered features appear to be present in this galaxy, which is so distant that its light has taken 12.8 billion years to reach us.

"We named this galaxy Zhúlóng, meaning 'Torch Dragon' in Chinese mythology. In the myth, Zhúlóng is a powerful red solar dragon that creates day and night by opening and closing its eyes, symbolizing light and cosmic time," team leader Mengyuan Xiao of the University of Geneva (UNIGE) said in a statement. "What makes Zhúlóng stand out is just how much it resembles the Milky Way in shape, size, and stellar mass."

Another similarity between the Milky Way and this early cosmic dragon galaxy is the sizes of their stellar disks and the masses of those regions. Zhúlóng's disk spans around 60,000 light-years and has a mass of 100 billion times that of the sun. The Milky Way's disk is slightly wider at 100,000 light-years wide with a stellar mass estimated at around 46 billion solar masses.

Zhúlóng was discovered in images collected during the JWST's ANORAMIC survey (GO-2514). This wide-area extragalactic program led by Christina Williams (NOIRLab) and Oesch (UNIGE) exploits a special mode of the $10 billion telescope called "pure parallel," which allows it to collect high-quality images of one object whilst also collecting data from other targets.

"This allows JWST to map large areas of the sky, which is essential for discovering massive galaxies, as they are incredibly rare," Williams said. "This discovery highlights the potential of pure parallel programs for uncovering rare, distant objects that stress-test galaxy formation models."

In the future, scientists could use the JWST and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a collection of 66 radio telescopes located in the Atacama desert region of northern Chile, to further investigate the qualities of Zhúlóng.

This could reveal the formation history of this well-ordered galaxy, explaining how a "grand design" spiral galaxy came to exist in the early universe.

"This discovery shows how JWST is fundamentally changing our view of the early universe," Oesch said.

The team's research was published on wednesday (April 16) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The snapshot above showcases NGC 1514, a planetary nebula that resides roughly 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. Despite the term, however, NGC 1514 has nothing to do with planets. Instead, at its heart, there are two stars.

These stars appear as a single point of light in the James Webb Space Telescope's view, and this point of light is encircled by an arc of orange dust. Of particular interest to astronomers is the nebula's faint, Venn-diagram-like structure — two rings of ejected material shaped by the gravitational influence of the central stars. Scientists say the rings offer a unique opportunity to dissect the complex interplay of stellar outflow over eons.

"Before Webb, we weren't able to detect most of this material, let alone observe it so clearly," Mike Ressler, a project scientist for the JWST's MIRI instrument who discovered the rings in 2010 using a different NASA telescope, said in a statement. "With MIRI's data, we can now comprehensively examine the turbulent nature of this nebula."

Previous observations of the binary system showed that the nine-year orbit of these two stars is one of the longest known for any planetary nebula. Astronomers suspect the nebula's formation was primarily driven by the more massive of the two stars. As that star aged, it likely underwent a dramatic expansion, shedding layers of gas and dust through its stellar wind and leaving behind a hot, compact core known as a white dwarf.

The faster, weaker winds emanating from this white dwarf likely swept up the earlier, slower-moving material, forming clumpy, filamentary rings that are extremely faint and only visible in infrared light, according to the statement. The JWST's view also reveals a network of holes close to the central stars where faster-moving material punched through the slower, denser outer layers of ejected gas and dust.

"When this star was at its peak of losing material, the companion star could have come exceptionally close," David Jones, a senior scientist at the Institute of Astrophysics on the Canary Islands, who proved there is a binary star system at the center of this planetary nebula in 2017, said in the statement. "That interaction can lead to shapes that you wouldn't expect — instead of producing a sphere, this interaction might have formed these rings."

The two rings appear unevenly illuminated and textured in the JWST's data, likely composed of very small dust grains that are slightly heated by ultraviolet light emanating from the central white dwarf.

"When those grains are hit by ultraviolet light from the white dwarf star, they heat up ever so slightly, which we think makes them just warm enough to be detected by Webb in mid-infrared light," Ressler said in the statement.

The JWST's observations also detected oxygen in the nebula's clumpy pink center, but carbon as well as complex molecules like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — typically expected in such nebulas — were notably absent. According to the statement, the long orbital period of the central binary stars may be responsible, as the extended orbit could have stirred the expelled material, preventing the formation of these more complex compounds.

The remarkable detail provided by observations like these has made the $10 billion JWST, NASA's largest and most powerful space telescope, more in demand than ever before, with astronomers requesting the equivalent of nine years' worth of observing time with the telescope in one operational year. This intense demand comes at a challenging time, however, as the JWST faces potential budget cuts of up to 20% despite being only halfway through its primary mission. These cuts, expected to take effect later this year, would impact all aspects of the observatory's work, from proposal reviews and data analysis to anomaly resolution and community engagement.

"Frankly, this mission works far better than, really, most folks expected it to, you know," Tom Brown, who leads the JWST mission office at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, had told scientists during a town hall event in January at the annual American Astronomical Society conference. "It's extremely worrisome that, while we're in the middle of the prime mission, we're also maybe looking at significant budget cuts."

These observations are also described in a paper published April 2 in The Astronomical Journal.

In 2020, the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in California spotted a distant star — that sits about 12,000 light-years away from us — suddenly brighten in the night sky. When looking back at the star in archival data from NASA's NEOWISE mission, astronomers found that the star, designated ZTF SLRN-2020, had been brightening in infrared light for a year before the optical flash.

A study from 2023 concluded that ZTF SLRN-2020 was an evolved sun-like star called a "red giant" that had expanded, in the process engulfing a gas giant planet orbiting around it. The flash of light was then interpreted as the planet being destroyed as it was consumed by the growing red giant; the infrared brightening was believed to be caused by dust left over as the planet effectively burned up in the red giant's atmosphere, much like a giant meteor.

However, a team led by Ryan Lau of the National Science Foundation's NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona, chose to take a closer look at ZTF SLRN-2020 using the JWST.

"Because this is such a novel event, we didn't quite know what to expect when we decided to point this telescope in its direction," said Lau in a statement. "With its high-resolution look in the infrared, we are learning valuable insights about the final fates of planetary systems, possibly including our own."

What Lau's team found was a surprise: The star wasn't bright enough to be a red giant. Instead, it looked like a "regular" star with about 70% of the mass of our sun. This, of course, changes the story of ZTF SLRN-2020. If the planet in this system wasn't consumed by a red giant, then the opposite is the only explanation: The planet must have crashed into the star instead.

How can this happen? Well, right from the very first exoplanet discoveries, astronomers have been finding bizarre worlds called hot Jupiters. These are gas giants that formed far from their star and then migrated inwards. This particular planet must have migrated so close to its parent star that, over time, gravitational tides began to pull the planet inexorably to its doom.

"The planet eventually started to graze the star's atmosphere. Then it was a runaway process of falling in faster from that moment," said Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The planet, as it's falling in, started to sort of smear around the star."

The tidal forces began to stretch the planet in a vice-like grip, until finally the planet "splashed down" into the gases of the star, and as the star swallowed the planet it belched out a tidal wave of gas into space. This ejected plume cooled and condensed into a cloud of gas, instigating the infrared brightening seen by NEOWISE.

But there was one more surprise. Astronomers had expected to see an amorphous cloud of gas, but the JWST's Near-Infrared Spectrometer instead found a disk of molecular gas encircling the star at close proximity. The disk looks for all the world like a miniature planet-forming disk.

"I could not have expected seeing what has the characteristics of a planet-forming region, even though planets are not forming here, in the aftermath of an engulfment," exoplanet astronomer Colette Salyk of Vassar College in New York said in the statement.

The disk is thought to be composed of some of the ejected gas plume that fell back towards the star, but the details are still sketchy. However, given that this is only the first of hopefully many similar planet-star collision events to be observed, it may be that we'll find the answers in another doomsday system. The in-depth, wide-field surveys of the forthcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory (which sees first light this year) and NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope are expected to find many other similar events that astronomers can follow up on with the JWST.

The results were published on April 10 in The Astrophysical Journal.

"Death" for a galaxy refers to the slowing down, or even halting, of intense star formation, which stops a galaxy from growing. Such dead galaxies are more formally referred to as being "quiescent," or "quenched." Early dead galaxies seen by the JWST have been referred to as "red and dead" galaxies due to their lack of massive hot young blue stars and their abundance of old small red stars. They have also been dubbed "Little Red Dots" due to their appearance in JWST images.

Light from this new record-breaking galaxy, designated RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7, has been traveling to us for 13 billion years, meaning the JWST saw it as it was just 700 million years after the Big Bang. That makes it the first so-called massive quiescent galaxy (MQG) seen in the infancy of the 13.8 billion-year-old universe.

"We discovered a galaxy which formed 15 billion times the mass of the sun in stars and then stopped forming stars before the universe was only 700 million years old," team member Andrea Weibel of the University of Geneva (UNIGE) Department of Astronomy told Space.com. "This makes RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 the most distant massive quiescent galaxy known to date."

The discovery may challenge our models of how galaxies evolve — and eventually stop growing — due to the cessation of star birth.

"The observation implies that some galaxies have stopped forming stars when the universe was only 700 million years old," Weibel said. "So far, models and simulations contain very few such objects, more than 100 times fewer than the existence of RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 suggests. This means that the physical processes and mechanisms that regulate star formation and its termination in galaxies in the early universe may have to be revisited."

Live fast; die young.

Quiescent galaxies are common immediately around the Milky Way. That's expected because the further away we look, the further back in time we are traveling. Thus, local massive galaxies have had a lot of time to start forming stars, grow to tremendous masses, and then exhaust the gas and dust needed for stellar construction, thus becoming quenched. We should expect more distant galaxies to still be enjoying their star-birthing youth.

As the JWST has probed further and further back in time, however, it has discovered earlier and earlier MQGs. Several of these red and dead galaxies were found as early as 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. Discovered as part of the "Red Unknowns: Bright Infrared Extragalactic Survey," or RUBIES, program, RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 pushes the detection of MQGs back by another 500 million years.

"Massive galaxies observed early in the universe only had a very limited amount of time to form their stars. This means they must have formed rapidly and efficiently, which helps us to constrain and, in some cases, even challenge theories and models of galaxy formation and growth," Weibel said. "RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7, however, is not only massive but has already stopped forming stars 50 to 100 million years before we observe it, while normal galaxies at these epochs are still building up their stellar mass through star formation."

Weibel explained that the mass of RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 and its reconstructed formation history suggest relatively efficient star formation for the galaxy. That does not directly challenge existing models of star formation.

"The galaxy is very compact and may be an example of an object where a lot of gas and dust — the fuel of star formation — collapses and assembles into a small volume, where stars can form rapidly and efficiently for an extended period of time, or in multiple bursts," Weibel said. "What makes RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 stand out is that it stopped forming stars so early on."

This MQG may stand out from Little Red Dots seen by the JWST in ways other than its rapid death.

"In the JWST images, RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 resembled objects named Little Red Dots, which have been discovered with the JWST," Weibel said. "Many of these objects turned out to have strong emission lines and/or showed signs of active galactic nuclei (AGN). Thus, at least a good fraction of the light we observe from Little Red Dots may actually originate from accreting supermassive black holes, rather than stars."

However, Weibel added that RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 shows no signs of an AGN, meaning its light comes entirely from stars, not from the violent conditions around a feeding black hole.

"This then implies its rather high mass and its quiescence, which both came as a big surprise," Weibel continued. "So far, we have only found one such object in all the JWST data that we investigated."

From this, the team calculated that galaxies like RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 should account for around one in 1 million galaxies.

"This is, however, quite uncertain, because we don't know how lucky we got to find one in the small patch of the sky that we have scanned so far," Weibel said. "With hopefully many more years of JWST taking data, we will be able to search larger areas of the sky and get a better idea of how common galaxies like RUBIES-UGD-QG-z7 actually are."

Performing higher resolution and deeper spectroscopy imaging of this galaxy could reveal the abundances of various elements, which would help better constrain the formation history of RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7.

"We will get more data on this galaxy in the upcoming Cycle 4 of JWST observations. Specifically, higher resolution spectroscopy," Weibel said.

The JWST may need a helping hand to study RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 from Earth's largest radio telescope project, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), which consists of 66 antennas located in the Atacama Desert region of Northern Chile.

"Data from the ALMA telescope at longer wavelengths of light can give us direct insight into the gas and dust content of the galaxy, which is closely related to its past and future star formation history," Weibel said.

The team's research was published on April 1 in The Astrophysical Journal.

The scientists found Big Wheel near a quasar, which is a powerful and active supermassive black hole, using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The galaxy lies 11.7 billion light-years away from our corner of the cosmos, and its given nickname comes from its remarkably fast rotation and huge size. It's five times more massive than the Milky Way, for context, stretches across 100,000 light-years.

More specifically, the astronomers used new spectroscopic observations with the JWST's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) to confirm that Big Wheel is a rotating disk. The galaxy's rotation curve, an important characteristic of spiral galaxies, shows a pattern typical of flat rotation curves seen in mature galaxies. The velocity of the galaxy's rotation increases as you move outward from the center, reaching a maximum rotational velocity of several hundred miles per second, which is also similar to much more developed galaxies.

Big Wheel's rotational velocity also aligns with the local Tully-Fisher relationship, a correlation between the size and rotation speed of galaxies observed today. What this all means it that, despite its youth, the galaxy behaves in a manner consistent with some of the largest, most mature spiral galaxies we see in the present universe. Big Wheel exists during a time when most galaxies are expected to be small and in their earliest stages of development. Yet, it's fully formed.

"This galaxy is spectacular for being among the largest spiral galaxies ever found, which is unprecedented for this early era of the universe," Charles Steidel, the study's lead author and an astronomy professor at Caltech, in a statement.

So, how could this happen?

One potential clue lies in Big Wheel's environment. The galaxy resides in a dense region of space where galaxy number densities are more than ten times higher than the cosmic average. This dense environment could provide the perfect conditions for rapid galaxy growth. Sebastiano Cantalupo, co-author of the study, suggests Big Wheel may have benefited from efficient gas accretion, which carried the coherent angular momentum necessary for the formation of large disks. Additionally, the frequent mergers of gas-rich galaxies in this crowded region may have contributed to its massive size and rapid growth.

"We think this may open the door to understanding how some galaxies were able to bypass the usual slow process of star formation and grow to enormous sizes in the early universe," Cantalupo said in the statement.

The discovery suggests that galaxy formation might not be as slow or gradual as previously thought, especially in environments rich in gas and merging galaxies.

Big Wheel challenges current cosmological models. Its size and mass far exceed predictions for galaxies at similar redshifts, making it an outlier in the galaxy population. Down the line, astronomers may need to adjust their models to account for the possibility of rapid galaxy growth under such dense conditions.

The study was published on March 17 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Despite residing in one of the galaxy's most extreme star-forming environments — just 200 light-years from the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* — and containing vast reserves of molecular gas, Sgr C doesn't birth as many stars as astronomers estimate it should. In 2023, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) provided astronomers with the first infrared data of this stellar nursery, enabling them to peer through the obscuring blanket of gas and dust and study its young stellar population in greater detail.

A fresh analysis of those observations has now revealed dozens of bright, needle-like filaments of hot plasma, some several light-years long, weaving in and out of the Sgr C nursery.

"We were definitely not expecting those filaments," Rubén Fedriani, a postdoctoral researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain, who co-authored two new studies reporting JWST observations, said in a statement. "It was a completely serendipitous discovery."

Fedriani and his colleagues suspect these newly detected filaments are sculpted by nearby magnetic fields, which themselves are stretched and amplified by turbulent motions of gas swirling around the behemoth black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*. This black hole has a mass of around four million times that of our sun and exerts supreme tidal forces on its surroundings.

These magnetic forces may be strong enough to counteract the typical gravitational star-forming collapse of molecular clouds, instead confining material into dense filaments seen in the JWST images, which helps explain why Sgr C is forming fewer stars than expected, according to the two new papers.

"For the first time, we are seeing directly that strong magnetic fields may play an important role in suppressing star formation, even at small scales," astrophysicist John Bally of the University of Colorado Boulder, who led one of the two new papers describing the JWST observations, said in another statement.

"This is an exciting area for future research, as the influence of strong magnetic fields, in the center of our galaxy or other galaxies, on stellar ecology has not been fully considered," Samuel Crowe of the University of Virginia, who led the second new paper, added in the same statement.

Bally and his team used JWST data to also infer that two massive young stars near the center of the Sgr C nursery are sandwiched between pairs of parallel, ropelike filaments, which likely trace the walls of cavities created by powerful stellar winds.

Owing to the extreme environment it resides in, observations show Sgr C has expelled much of its star-forming material, suggesting the nursery could vanish in just a few hundred thousand years — a blink of an eye in the context of the universe's 13.7 billion-year history.

"It's almost the end of the story," Bally said in the statement.

These findings are described in two papers published Wednesday (April 2) in the Astrophysical Journal.

For a few weeks in January and February this year, asteroid 2024 YR4 had us all worried.

Shortly after it was discovered, astronomers calculated that the asteroid had a 1-in-83 chance of hitting Earth in 2032 — that's an impact risk of around 1%. Experts urged caution, though noting that the impact odds were likely to fall significantly. Sure enough, by late February, the probability of the asteroid hitting Earth fell to near zero.

This asteroid, however, is still worth analysis in its own right. As such, scientists recently turned the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) powerful gaze towards 2024 YR4, capturing the object in both visible and thermal light. The team measured the asteroid to be around 200 feet (60 meters) in diameter. "That's just about the height of a 15-story building," Andy Rivkin of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory said in a statement.

The JWST also helped scientists study how quickly the space rock heats up and cools down. According to Rivkin, these thermal properties in 2024 YR4 are "not like what we see in larger asteroids," likely due to the fact that it spins very quickly and that its surface is "dominated by rocks that are maybe fist-sized or larger," rather than fine grains of sand.

Rivkin said studying asteroids like 2024 YR4 with the JWST is "invaluable" for helping scientists figure out how our space telescopes might aid planetary defense efforts if another "possible impactor" is found down the line.

"All together, we have a better sense of what this building-sized asteroid is like," Rivkin said.

"This will help us determine the best approach to use during a more urgent observing program should another asteroid pose a potential impact threat in the future."

A study about the JWST's observations of asteroid 2024 YR4 were published in the journal Research Notes of the AAS.

William Balmer, a Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of the study, spoke to Space.com about how the images were captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, and why these results represent a major leap forward in our understanding of exoplanets, how they form and the search for extraterrestrial life.

"Direct imaging is critical for studying distant planets because it tells us the most information about the structure and composition of their atmospheres, independent of the light from the host star," Balmer explained.

Direct imaging of distant planets poses a major challenge due to several factors. Fore one, telescopes have difficulty distinguishing the faint light from a planet from the much brighter light emitted by its host star. The star's glare can overwhelm any signals coming from the planet, making it difficult to study the world's atmosphere in detail. This also isn't helped by the fact that most exoplanets are incredibly far away from us, which further limits the ability to capture clear images of them.

Here's where the James Webb Space Telescope comes in. Its advanced technology, including its large mirror and suite of specialized instruments, allows it to detect very faint emissions coming from orbiting exoplanets in the mid-infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum — and this capability has opened a new frontier in exoplanet research.

"Different gases at various pressures and temperatures in the planet's atmosphere will absorb or emit light of specific wavelengths, and we can use these chemical imprints on the light to model with increasing clarity not only what planets are made out of, but how they might have formed based on what they're made out of," said Balmer.

Balmer and colleagues took this a step further by capturing innovative coronagraphic images of exoplanets in HR 8799 and 51 Eridani — and they did so by using the JWST's coronagraphs in an unconventional way.

"I like to joke that for this paper we 'used the coronagraphs wrong,' but what we really did was use a very thin part of the coronagraph mask, which allowed more starlight to diffract or leak around the edges of the coronagraph," Balmer explained.

Coronagraphs, first developed in 1930 to study the sun's corona, work by blocking starlight to reveal faint surrounding objects. On the JWST, they enable high-contrast imaging of exoplanets in the near- to mid-infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, if the coronagraph blocks too much light, it can obscure not just the star but also nearby planets.

To address this, Balmer's team adjusted the JWST's coronagraph masks, fine-tuning how much starlight was blocked to maximize planetary visibility.

"We relied on the stability of the JWST, [first] observing our targets [and then imaging] similar stars without known planets for comparison," said Balmer. By subtracting these reference images from the target images, the team effectively removed the star's light, isolating the faint signals from the planets.

"Because [the JWST] is so stable, the differences between the reference and target images are smaller than the light from the planets around our targets [allowing us to detect them more clearly]," added Balmer.

The study is also notable for producing the first-ever image of HR 8799 at 4.6 microns, a wavelength in the mid-infrared range. This is a significant achievement, as Earth's atmosphere absorbs much of the light at this wavelength, making ground-based observations in the range nearly impossible.

"Earth's atmosphere has only a brief window of transparency at 4.6 microns," Balmer explained. "Previous ground-based observations had attempted to image the innermost HR 8799 e at these wavelengths and failed. Some ground-based telescopes have larger mirrors than JWST, but our success highlights just how crucial the JWST's stability is for these kinds of detections."

But even more exciting for the team was the JWST's ability to observe at 4.3 microns — wavelengths completely blocked by Earth's atmosphere.

"The most exciting wavelength we had access to with the JWST is at 4.3 microns, where none of these planets had been observed before," said Balmer. "Since the Earth's atmosphere has a lot of carbon dioxide, [it] blocks a large amount of light at this wavelength."

The JWST's advantage here is that it exists beyond Earth's atmosphere, about a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from our planet in space.

Carbon dioxide levels reveal key details about a planet's formation. In a planetary atmosphere, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide are both present, but their balance depends on the amount of oxygen available. Because carbon dioxide contains more oxygen than carbon monoxide, a planet with high carbon dioxide levels likely has a higher abundance of "heavy" elements like carbon, oxygen, magnesium and iron. These elements come from the materials that originally formed the planet.

"Since the strength of the carbon dioxide feature in the HR 8799 planets' atmospheres is so strong, we are fairly confident that they have a larger fraction of heavy elements compared to its host star, which means they had to gather those heavy elements from somewhere," said Balmer.

The most likely explanation is that these planets formed through a process called core accretion — where rocky and icy cores grew large enough to capture thick atmospheres of hydrogen and other gases with their gravity.

The study's observations also revealed unexpected diversity in the "colors" of the HR 8799 system's inner planets. "The differences between the HR 8799 planets are quite interesting because previously these planets have looked relatively similar in the near-infrared," said Balmer, pointing out this example. "The mid-infrared clues us into different molecules, so it might be that the different colors of the planets in our images are due to differences in vertical mixing or composition."

For example, vertical mixing, which is the process of gases moving up and down a planet's atmosphere, can result in molecules ending up in places where scientists might not expect them to be.

"For instance, based on the temperatures of the HR 8799 planets, they should have a lot of methane in their upper atmospheres, and so we should see large methane absorption features," said Balmer. "Instead, we see very little methane, and a lot more carbon monoxide . This is because vertical mixing has moved warm, CO-rich gas from the deeper layers of the atmosphere up into the outer layers, where it has 'out competed' the methane that should be there."

A similar atmospheric process may be at play in 51 Eridani b, where the JWST's detection at 4.1 microns suggests out-of-equilibrium carbon chemistry. This planet is much fainter than expected, likely due to high levels of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in its upper atmosphere. "This indicates that the planet is probably metal rich, like HR 8799, but more particularly that hot, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide rich gases from the planet's lower atmosphere are convected up into the upper atmosphere, where they absorb more outgoing light."

A similar process, for context, also occurs on Earth.

Balmer hopes future models will improve how they account for clouds and vertical mixing, allowing for better interpretation of high-precision data. Their team has been awarded 23 more hours of JWST time to study four additional planetary systems, aiming to determine whether their gas giants formed through core accretion. Understanding this process could reveal how giant planets influence the stability and habitability of smaller, unseen terrestrial worlds.

An elliptical galaxy and a spiral galaxy appear as one celestial body as a result of the effects of mass on spacetime, the fabric of the universe.

Why is this amazing?

Two celestial bodies become one in a rare cosmic phenomenon called an "Einstein ring."

Einstein rings are the result of light from one very distant object being lensed, or "bent" about a massive object located in between the target and the viewer. This effect — which demonstrates that light and spacetime, the fabric of the universe, can be bent by mass — cannot be observed on a local level.

It sometimes can occur, though, when the curvature of light is on tremendous scales, such as when the light from one galaxy is bent around another galaxy or galaxy cluster as seen here.

Whare are the two galaxies in this Einstein ring?

The elliptical galaxy at the center of this Einstein ring belongs to a galaxy cluster named SMACSJ0028.2-7537. It can be seen as the oval-shaped, featurless glow around the small bright core.

The spiral galaxy being wrapped or lensed around the elliptical galaxy appears to be stretched and warped into a ring, with bright blue lines drawn through it where the spiral arms have been stretched into circles.

Why and how was this image taken?

The James Webb Space Telescope data used in this image was taken as part of the Strong Lensing and Cluster Evolution (SLICE) survey led by Guillaume Mahler at University of Liège in Belgium, together with a team of international astronomers. The survey is intended to trace 8 billion years of galaxy cluster evolution by targeting 182 galaxy clusters with Webb's Near-InfraRed Camera instrument.

This image also incorporates data from two of the Hubble Space Telescope's instruments, the Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys.

Where can I learn more?

You can see and read more about another Einstein ring imaged by the Webb space telescope and learn why such a phenomenon may point to dark matter interacting with itself.

You can also read about how distortions in space-time, such as cosmic lensing, could test Einstein's theory of relativity.

For the first time, the James Webb Space Telescope (JSWT) has revealed bright auroral activity on the planet Neptune.

Capturing the auroral activity on the ice giant has been long in coming, even though similar areas of trapped solar energetic particles have been successfully imaged in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus.

Why is this amazing?

Previously, the existence of auroral activity on Neptune was only hinted at, as instruments on NASA’s Voyager 2 probe, which flew by the planet in 1989, and the Hubble Space Telescope were unable to capture the glow.

“Turns out, actually imaging the auroral activity on Neptune was only possible with Webb’s near-infrared sensitivity,” said Henrik Melin of Northumbria University, whose research while at the University of Leicester has now been published in the journal Nature. “It was so stunning to not just see the auroras, but the detail and clarity of the signature really shocked me.”

In Webb's images of Neptune, the aurora appears as lighter blue or cyan areas set against the blue planet.

Is this the same as the northern or southern lights on Earth?

The auroral glow occurs because of the same basic interaction of solar particles interacting with the planet's atmosphere, but instead of being confined to the north and south poles, Neptune’s auroras are located at the planet’s mid-latitudes — roughly where South America is located on Earth.

The location of Neptune's auroral glow is the result the planet's magnetic field, which is tilted by 47 degrees from the planet’s rotation axis. Auroral activity occurs where a planet's magnetic fields converge into its atmosphere, so Neptune’s auroras are found far from its rotational poles.

What can we learn from Neptune's auroras?

The detection of Neptune's auroras will help astronomers better understand how particles from the sun interact with its atmosphere, providing a new area of study about ice giant planets.

The data from the Webb Space Telescope also enabled measurements of the temperature at the top of Neptune's atmosphere for the first time since Voyager 2's flyby. Those results may point to why Neptune’s auroras have gone unseen until now.

"I was astonished — Neptune's upper atmosphere has cooled by several hundreds of degrees,” Melin said in a Space Telescope Science Institute release. "In fact, the temperature in 2023 was just over half of that in 1989."

Where can I learn more?

You can read more about Neptune and aurora on Earth. You can also read what it would be like to see aurora on other planets and how infrared aurora was first detected on Uranus in 2023.