One of JWST's big tasks is to help astronomers understand how the early Universe came together, with dwarf galaxies merging into larger, more mature galaxies. Supermassive black holes at these galaxies' hearts also grew, shining as quasars within the first billion years. A new paper uses several extragalactic surveys by JWST to find dozens of compact galaxies that seem to host faint quasars as young as 650 million years after the Big Bang.

Astronomers discovered a rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun. Could there be life there? The European Southern Observatory's 39-meter Extremely Large Telescope is under construction and expected to be completed in the next few years. Could this mighty observatory see evidence of biosignatures in the reflected light from the planet?