Space and astronomy news
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.
Continue reading “The JWST Just Found Carbon on Europa, Boosting the Moon’s Potential Habitability”
Ever wondered what our young Sun might have looked like in its infancy some five billion years ago?
The audacious JWST has captured an image of a very young star much like our young Sun, though the star itself is obscured. Instead, we see supersonic jets of gas. Young stars can blast out jets of material as they form, and the jets light up the surrounding gas. The luminous regions created by the jets as they slam into the gas are called Herbig-Haro Objects.
Continue reading “It’s Like Looking at the Infant Sun: Webb Captures Image of an Energetic Young Star”
In March 2022, astronomers announced the discovery of the farthest known star via an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. They named it Earendel, after the old English name for “morning star”. Now, JWST’s Near-infrared Camera (NIRCam) and its NIRSpec spectrometer have taken a look at the same star and revealed more details about it.
Continue reading “JWST Turns its Gaze on the Farthest Known Star: Earendel”
We’ve been getting plenty of spectacular images from the James Webb Space Telescope since it began operations last year. Fraser even covered everything we learned from it in a video a few weeks ago. But the news keeps coming, and recently a science team known as the Prime Extra-Galactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science (PEARLS) team released a series of four papers describing Webb’s observations of a galaxy cluster known as El Gordo (“the fat one” in Spanish). But what’s more – they also released another absolutely stunning picture.
Continue reading “JWST Sees Multiple Gravitational Lenses in a Massive Cluster: “The Fishhook” and “The Thin One””
A pair of studies published in JGR: Planets and Science Advances discuss new findings from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) regarding Jupiter’s first and third Galilean Moons, Io and Ganymede, and more specifically, how the massive Jupiter is influencing activity on these two small worlds. For Io, whose mass is about 21 percent larger than Earth’s Moon, the researchers made the first discovery of sulfur monoxide (SO) gas on the volcanically active moon. For Ganymede, which is the largest moon in the solar system and boasts twice the mass of the Earth’s Moon, the researchers made the first discovery of hydrogen peroxide, which exists in Ganymede’s polar regions.
Continue reading “Jupiter’s Moons Get the JWST Treatment”
The more astronomers look at the early Universe, the more discoveries they make. Some of those finds change what they thought they knew about the infancy of the cosmos. For example, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently found evidence of carbon-based molecules and dust existing only a billion years after the Big Bang. It looks a bit different from the dust observed later in the Universe.
Continue reading “Carbon-Based Molecules Seen Just a Billion Years After the Big Bang”
As astronomers push our views of the Universe further back in time, their telescopes keep uncovering surprises. That’s the case with a supermassive black hole in CEERS 1019, a distant very early galaxy.
Continue reading “JWST Sees the Most Distant Active Supermassive Black Hole”
We can gaze out into regions in our neighbourhood of the Milky Way and find orgies of star birth. The closest region is in the Orion nebula, where astronomers have identified more than 700 young stars. They range from only 100,000 years—mere infancy for a star—to over a million years.
But we’re more than 13 billion years after the Big Bang now. What was star formation like way back when, when conditions in the Universe were so different?
Continue reading “JWST Shows How the Early Universe Was Furiously Forming Stars”
Just because there’s no Mini-Neptune in our Solar System doesn’t mean they’re not common. They appear to be widespread throughout the Milky Way, and according to NASA, are the most common exoplanet type. GJ 1214 b is one of them.
Continue reading “JWST Looks at the Atmosphere of a Stormy, Steamy Mini-Neptune”
If we want to know what it’ll look like in about 4.5 billion years when our galaxy merges with Andromeda, we might take a look at ARP 220. ARP 220 is a pair of galaxies that are in the process of merging. The merging galaxies emit brilliant infrared light, and the James Webb Space Telescope captured that light in a vivid portrait.
Continue reading “JWST Sees Merging Galaxies Releasing the Light of a Trillion Suns”