James Webb Space Telescope Archives

July 24, 2023July 24, 2023 by Nancy Atkinson

JWST Sees Newly Forming Planets Swimming in Water

This artist’s concept portrays the star PDS 70 and its inner protoplanetary disk. New measurements by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have detected water vapor at distances of less than 100 million miles from the star – the region where rocky, terrestrial planets may be forming. This is the first detection of water in the terrestrial region of a disk already known to host two or more protoplanets, one of which is shown at upper right. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI)

One big question about Earth’s formation is, where did all the water come from? New data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows newly forming planets in a system 370 light-years away are surrounded by water vapor in their orbits. Although astronomers have detected water vapor in protoplanetary disks before, this is the first time it’s been seen where the planets are forming.

July 4, 2023July 4, 2023 by Matt Williams

James Webb is a GO for Cycle 2 Observations!

Artist conception of the James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: NASA GSFC/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has accomplished some amazing things during its first year of operations! In addition to taking the most detailed and breathtaking images ever of iconic celestial objects, Webb completed its first deep field campaign, turned its infrared optics on Mars and Jupiter, obtained spectra directly from an exoplanet’s atmosphere, blocked out the light of a star to reveal the debris disk orbiting it, detected its first exoplanet, and spotted some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe – those that existed at Cosmic Dawn.

Well, buckle up! The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) has just announced what Webb will be studying during its second year of operations – aka. Cycle 2! According to a recent STScI statement, approximately 5,000 hours of prime time and 1,215 hours of parallel time were awarded to General Observer (GO) programs. The programs allotted observation time range from studies of the Solar System and exoplanets to the interstellar and intergalactic medium, from supermassive black holes and quasars to the large-scale structure of the Universe.

June 29, 2023July 1, 2023 by Evan Gough

Here Come JWST’s First Images of Saturn

Saturn by JWST — Image of Saturn and some of its moons, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam instrument on June 25, 2023. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, M. Tiscareno (SETI Institute), M. Hedman (University of Idaho), M. El Moutamid (Cornell University), M. Showalter (SETI Institute), L. Fletcher (University of Leicester), H. Hammel (AURA); image processing by J. DePasquale (STScI)

Note: This story has been updated with new images.

It’s Saturn’s turn.

The JWST is aiming its powerful, gold-coated, segmented beryllium mirror at our Solar System’s second-largest, and perhaps most striking, planet. So far, we’ve only got a sneak preview of the raw images without any processing or scientific commentary.

But they’re a start.

June 28, 2023June 28, 2023 by Laurence Tognetti

UK Professor Granted JWST Observation Time to Study Jupiter’s Upper Atmosphere

Professor Tom Stallard (Credit: Simon Veit-Wilson/Northumbria University)

A professor from Northumbria University in the North East region of England has been granted telescope time with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) later this year to study Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, also known as its ionosphere. Being granted such access to JWST is extremely competitive which makes getting access to use its powerful instruments to study the cosmos a very high honor.

June 20, 2023June 20, 2023 by Matt Williams

JWST Glimpses the Cosmic Dawn of the Universe

This still image shows the timeline running from the Big Bang on the right, towards the present on the left. In the middle is the Reionization Period where the initial bubbles caused the cosmic dawn. Credit: NASA SVS

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continues to push the boundaries of astronomy and cosmology, the very job it was created for. First conceived during the 1990s, and with development commencing about a decade later, the purpose of this next-generation telescope is to pick up where Spitzer and the venerable Hubble Space Telescope (HST) left off – examining the infrared Universe and looking farther back in time than ever before. One of the chief objectives of Webb is to observe high-redshift (high-Z) galaxies that formed during Cosmic Dawn.

This period refers to the Epoch of Reionization, where the first galaxies emitted large amounts of ultraviolet (UV) photons that ionized the neutral hydrogen that made up the intergalactic medium (IGM), causing the Universe to become transparent. The best way to measure the level of star formation is the H-alpha emission line, which is visible in the mid-infrared spectrum for galaxies with high redshifts. Using data from the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), an international team of researchers was able to resolve the H-alpha line and observe galaxies with redshift values higher than seven (z>7) for the first time.

June 20, 2023June 20, 2023 by Nancy Atkinson

The Suspense is Killing Us. The Next Planet in the TRAPPIST System Gets the JWST Treatment

This artist' concept shows what the hot rocky exoplanet TRAPPIST-1 c could look like based on observations by the James Webb Space Telescope. TRAPPIST-1 c, the second of seven known planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system, orbits its star at a distance of 0.016 AU (about 1.5 million miles), completing one circuit in just 2.42 Earth-days. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

The TRAPPIST-1 system is easily the most exciting collection of exoplanets ever discovered by astronomers. The system contains seven rocky planets orbiting an ultracool red dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth. Several of the planets are in the star’s habitable zone.

With the James Webb Space Telescope’s ability to detect and study the atmospheres of distant planets orbiting other stars, data on the TRAPPIST planets have been highly anticipated. Astronomers have now released detailed information about the second planet, TRAPPIST-1 c, theorized to be a Venus-like world. Unlike Venus, however, JWST failed to detect any trace of a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere.

June 6, 2023June 6, 2023 by Evan Gough

JWST Sees Organic Molecules Ludicrously Far Away

Astronomers using the Webb telescope discovered evidence of complex organic molecules in a galaxy more than 12 billion light-years away. In this false-color Webb image, the foreground galaxy is shown in blue, while the background galaxy is red. The organic molecules are highlighted in orange. Graphic courtesy J. Spilker / S. Doyle, NASA, ESA, CSA

When astronomers used the JWST to look at a galaxy more than 12 billion light years away, they were also looking back in time. And when they found organic molecules in that distant galaxy, they found them in the early Universe.

The organic molecules are usually found where stars are forming, but in this case, they’re not.

June 5, 2023June 5, 2023 by Evan Gough

The Latest JWST Image Pierces Through a Shrouded Star-Forming Galaxy

A delicate tracery of dust and bright star clusters threads across this image of NGC 5068 from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Image Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST Team

Sometimes an image is so engrossing that we can ignore what it’s telling us about its subject and just enjoy the splendour. That’s certainly true of this image of NGC 5068 released by the ESA. But Universe Today readers are curious, and after enjoying the galactic portrait for a while, they want to know more.

May 31, 2023May 31, 2023 by Matt Williams

Here's How You Could Get Impossibly Large Galaxies in the Early Universe

The galaxy cluster SMACS0723, with the five galaxies selected for closer study. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI / Giménez-Arteaga et al. (2023), Peter Laursen (Cosmic Dawn Center).

One of the most interesting (and confounding) discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the existence of “impossibly large galaxies.” As noted in a previous article, these galaxies existed during the “Cosmic Dawn,” the period that coincided with the end of the “Cosmic Dark Age” (roughly 1 billion years after the Big Bang). This period is believed to hold the answers to many cosmological mysteries, not the least of which is what the earliest galaxies in the Universe looked like. But after Webb obtained images of these primordial galaxies, astronomers noticed something perplexing.

The galaxies were much larger than what the most widely accepted cosmological model predicts! Since then, astronomers and astrophysicists have been racking their brains to explain how these galaxies could have formed. Recently, a team of astrophysicists from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jerusalem published a theoretical model that addresses the mystery of these massive galaxies. According to their findings, the prevalence of special conditions in these galaxies (at the time) allowed highly-efficient rates of star formation without interference from other stars.

May 30, 2023May 30, 2023 by Nancy Atkinson

JWST Spies a Gigantic Water Plume at Enceladus

Images from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) show a water vapour plume jetting from the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, extending out 40 times the size of the moon itself. The inset, an image from the Cassini orbiter, emphasises how small Enceladus appears in the JWST image compared to the water plume. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, G. Villanueva (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center), A. Pagan (STScI).

The James Webb Space Telescope has observed a huge water vapor plume emanating from Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Astronomers say the plume reaches nearly 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) into space, which is about the equivalent distance as going from Ireland to Japan. This is the largest plume ever detected at Enceladus.