Another Hycean Planet Found? TOI-270 d

Artist's impression of the surface of a hycean world. Hycean worlds are still hypothetical, and have large oceans and thick hydrogen-rich atmospheres that trap heat. They could be habitable even if they're outside the traditional habitable zone. Credit: University of Cambridge

Hycean planets may be able to host life even though they’re outside what scientists consider the regular habitable zone. Their thick atmospheres can trap enough heat to keep the oceans warm even though they’re not close to their stars.

Astronomers have found another one of these potential hycean worlds named TOI-270 d.

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This Galaxy Was Already Dead When the Universe Was Only 700 Million Years Old

False-color JWST image of a small fraction of the GOODS South field, with the galaxy JADES-GS-z7-01-QU highlighted Credit: JADES Collaboration
False-color JWST image of a small fraction of the GOODS South field, with the galaxy JADES-GS-z7-01-QU highlighted Credit: JADES Collaboration

When a galaxy runs out of gas and dust, the process of star birth stops. That takes billions of years. But, there’s a galaxy out there that was already dead when the Universe was only 700 million years old. What happened to it?

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JWST Sees a Milky Way-Like Galaxy Coming Together in the Early Universe

The ancient Firefly Sparkle galaxy is precursor to galaxies like the Milky Way. The JWST found ten separate clusters in the galaxy that show how the galaxy is growing through mergers. Image Credit: Mowla et al. 2024.

The gigantic galaxies we see in the Universe today, including our own Milky Way galaxy, started out far smaller. Mergers throughout the Universe’s 13.7 billion years gradually assembled today’s massive galaxies. But they may have begun as mere star clusters.

In an effort to understand the earliest galaxies, the JWST has examined their ancient light for clues as to how they became so massive.

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A New View of Uranus’ North Pole from JWST

One cool thing about Uranus is that its orientation, compared to the rest of the solar system, allows a unique perspective of the planet from our home planet. It is tilted at 98° compared to the rest of the ecliptic plane. So, when viewed from Earth, we can see its North Pole and its rings in some exceptional cases. That perspective is fully displayed in an image of Uranus recently released by the European Space Agency (ESA) and captured using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). 

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Can Webb Find the First Stars in the Universe?

The Universe’s very first stars had an important job. They formed from the primordial elements created by the Big Bang, so they contained no metals. It was up to them to synthesize the first metals and spread them out into the nearby Universe.

The JWST has made some progress in finding the Universe’s earliest galaxies. Can it have the same success when searching for the first stars?

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JWST Finds the Smallest Free-Floating Brown Dwarf

Star cluster IC 348 seen by the MIRI instrument of JWST. Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Kevin Luhman (PSU), Catarina Alves de Oliveira (ESA). Brown dwarf image credit: NASA
Star cluster IC 348 seen by the MIRI instrument of JWST. Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Kevin Luhman (PSU), Catarina Alves de Oliveira (ESA). Brown dwarf image credit: NASA

Star formation is happening all around us in the Universe. However, there is still plenty we don’t know about it, including, as a recent press release points out, something that every astronomy textbook points out – we don’t know the size of the smallest star. Most current answers in those textbooks refer to an object known as a brown dwarf, a cross between a star and a giant planet. Recently, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) found what is believed to be the smallest brown dwarf ever discovered – and it weighs in at only 3-4 times the weight of Jupiter.

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A Galaxy Only 350 Million Years Old Had Surprising Amounts of Metal

The JWST has the power to see the most ancient galaxies in the Universe, as shown in this image of its first deep field. Now, astrophysicists have found carbon in one of these ancient galaxies. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

Astrophysicists working with the JWST have found a surprising amount of metal in a galaxy only 350 million years after the Big Bang. How does that fit in with our understanding of the Universe?

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Astronomers Want JWST to Study the Milky Way Core for Hundreds of Hours

This overview of the Milky Way's Galactic Center (GC) shows the region of the proposed JWST survey. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/S. Stolovy (Spitzer Science Center/Caltech)

To understand the Universe, we need to understand the extreme processes that shape it and drive its evolution. Things like supermassive black holes (SMBHs,) supernovae, massive reservoirs of dense gas, and crowds of stars both on and off the main sequence. Fortunately there’s a place where these objects dwell in close proximity to one another: the Milky Way’s Galactic Center (GC.)

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Feast Your Eyes on this Star-Forming Region, Thanks to the JWST

The JWST cast its infrared gaze at NGC 346, a young open cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud. It's the largest and brightest star forming region in the SMC. Image Credit: ESA/CSA/NASA N. Habel (JPL), P. Kavanagh (Maynooth University)

Nature is stingy with its secrets. That’s why humans developed the scientific method. Without it, we’d still be ignorant and living in a world dominated by superstitions.

Astrophysicists have made great progress in understanding how stars form, thanks to the scientific method. But there’s a lot they still don’t know. That’s one of the reasons NASA built the James Webb Space Telescope: to coerce Nature into surrendering its deeply-held secrets.

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The JWST Just Found Carbon on Europa, Boosting the Moon’s Potential Habitability

This reprocessed colour view of Jupiter’s moon Europa was made from images taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Most planets and moons in the Solar System are clearly dead and totally unsuitable for life. Earth is the only exception. But there are a few worlds where there are intriguing possibilities of life.

Chief among them is Jupiter’s moon Europa, and the JWST just discovered carbon there. That makes the moon and its subsurface ocean an even more desirable target in the search for life.

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