Paleontologists now know that many of the dinosaurs didn't disappear but instead evolved into modern birds, and new research suggests that "cosmic dinosaurs" observed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) didn't go extinct either. Rather, they may have evolved into familiar sights in the modern universe: vast conglomerations of densely packed stars called "globular clusters."

Little Red Dots became quite the puzzle for astronomers in 2022, when the JWST began to routinely spot them in abundance around 600 million years after the Big Bang. That is because these objects seemingly disappear before the cosmos gets to around 2 billion years old.

Astronomers have proposed many different explanations for Little Red Dots, including the suggestion that they could be "black hole stars," or black holes wrapped in vast shrouds of dense gas and dust. This team theorizes that a forming globular cluster with a supermassive star, a hypothetical short-lived stellar body with between 1,000 and 10,000 times the mass of the sun, would also look a lot like a Little Red Dot at its heart.

"These may not be just a strange new JWST population with no connection to the universe around us today," team leader John Chisholm of the University of Texas Austin said in a statement. "Instead, Little Red Dots may persist past the early universe, evolving into something relatively familiar.

"Little Red Dots could be galaxies, they could involve black holes, or they could be something even more unexpected. Our work shows that forming globular clusters with supermassive stars should be part of that conversation."

An unfamiliar side to a familar sight

Globular clusters are generally seen in large galaxies and are densely packed with up to many millions of ancient stars. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is host to at least 150 globular clusters, and though familiar, astronomers still aren't quite sure how they form.

"We usually see them [globular clusters] after billions of years of evolution, at a time when their massive stars are gone, their gas has been cleared out, and dynamical processes have changed their masses and structures," team member Danielle Berg of UT Austin said in the statement. "That makes it very hard to reconstruct the original conditions they formed in."

It is thought that the stars in globular clusters all formed at the same time in the early universe. However, at this time the cosmos should only have had hydrogen, helium and a smattering of heavier elements (which astronomers call "metals") available for star construction. Yet, many stars in globular clusters are strangely abundant in helium and metals like nitrogen, sodium and aluminum, while lacking the expected levels of carbon, oxygen and magnesium.

"This specific pattern indicates nuclear fusion at very high temperatures, much higher than in the cores of even massive normal stars," team member Mike Boylan-Kolchin of UT Austin said in the statement. "A supermassive star is precisely the kind of environment that could produce this combination."

Supermassive stars capable of generating this kind of heat would form in the dense environments of early globular clusters in which stellar collisions and mergers would be expected to occur over and over again. The resultant supermassive stars would be short-lived, lasting just around 1 million years (remember the sun is middle-aged at 4.6 billion years old) — but this would be sufficient time to forge the elements needed to explain the peculiar chemistry of globular clusters.

When these supermassive stars die in supernova explosions, the elements they forged would be blasted out to become the building blocks of the next generation of stars. This would provide the stars of modern globular clusters with their unusual chemical fingerprints.

"In our model, the supermassive star that helps make the object look like a Little Red Dot would live for only a short time," Chisholm continued. "Once that star dies, the object may no longer look like a Little Red Dot, even if the cluster itself survives billions of years."

Strange chemistry isn't the only thing linking early globular clusters with Little Red Dots, however. Not only does the team propose that the distribution of Little Red Dots in the early universe matches the distribution of modern globular clusters, but they also say models of Little Red Dot evolution show that their estimated masses could easily lead to the masses of globular clusters seen in the recent universe.

There is also the issue of timing. Little Red Dots appear around 600 million years after the Big Bang, and that is also the time that scientists estimate that globular clusters would have begun to form.

"There's no single smoking gun at this point that says Little Red Dots are globular clusters, but it would explain a lot of diverse and surprising observations," said Boylan-Kolchin.

This study is currently available to view as a pre-print on the paper repository arXiv.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered the secrets of early galaxies that pumped the infant cosmos full of dust, which would become vital for the birth of new stars and the growth of galaxies.

However, while the JWST is powerful enough to see many of these early galaxies, it is still limited when it comes to delving into them in great detail. So, the team at the heart of this research worked around this by studying a much closer and more modern galaxy with many characteristics that resemble the universe's first galaxies.

In lieu of being able to study the processes that occurred in the early universe that allowed galaxies to be seeded with "metals, (the term astronomers use to describe elements heavier than hydrogen and helium), the researchers turned their attention to a dwarf galaxy just 4.6 million light-years away.

"Directly studying the galaxies that populated the early universe is still very difficult, which is why observing a nearby galaxy like Sextans A, which presents similar chemical conditions, offers us a precious opportunity to understand how the first generations of stars evolved and what role they played in transforming the interstellar medium," team leader Claudio Gavetti of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) said in a statement.

How does Sextans A impersonate ancient galaxies?

The early universe was a pretty dull place in terms of chemistry. That is because it was dominated by the lightest element, hydrogen, with some helium and a tiny smattering of heavy elements, or metals. That means that the first generation of stars, so-called POP III stars, were correspondingly metal-poor.

During their lives, however, POP III stars fused hydrogen and helium in their cores to forge heavier elements. When these original stars reached the ends of their lives, they exploded in supernova explosions that dispersed these metals into the interstellar medium, the vast clouds of dust and gas between stars.

Eventually, dense and cool patches in these vast clouds collapsed under their own gravity, birthing the next generation of stars, POP II stars, which, thanks to the supernova deaths of their predecessors, were richer in metals.

Our own star, the sun, is classed as a POP I star, meaning it is even richer in metals than these second-generation stars. However, not all modern galaxies are so metal-rich; this is especially true for dwarf galaxies like Sextans A, even though it lies at the outer edge of our cosmic backyard, known as the "local group."

Sextans A is so metal-poor that it is estimated to contain only between 1% and 7% of the heavy elements found in the sun. That makes it a great proxy for the study of metal-poor early galaxies.

Using the JWST's NIRCam (Near-InfraRed Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) instruments, Gavetti and colleagues obtained high-resolution observations of Sextans A that allowed them to map the dwarf galaxy's entire population of stars during an evolutionary phase known as the "asymptotic red giant branch."

This phase occurs when stars larger than the sun exhaust helium in their cores, creating an inert carbon heart, but nuclear fusion continues in outer alternating helium- and hydrogen-burning layers. These stars "puff out" as a result of this and can undergo thousandfold increases in brightness.

The team's findings revealed that around 90% of the asymptotic red giant branch stars they studied were not surrounded by envelopes of dust. However, around 20 or so of these stars were embedded in thick dust shells. They also found that these "dust factories" formed between 2 billion and 3 billion years ago from stars with an initial mass about 1.5 times the mass of the sun.

This research is a leap forward in understanding which stars in the early universe were most likely to create the metal dust that would have enriched the next generations of stars. That means it helps paint a complete picture of how the universe as we see it today took shape.

The scientists behind this study say that this type of research would have been impossible before the launch of Webb.

"The JWST allows us to observe in unprecedented detail environments that until a few years ago were beyond our reach," team member Flavia Dell'Agli of the INAF. "The value of these data lies not only in the images, but in the ability to compare them with theoretical models and verify how correctly they describe the evolution of stars."

The team's research was published on Monday (July 20) in The Astrophysical Journal.

A young cluster of galaxies sparkles under a cosmic glow that's 4.4 billion years old. This peek into the past shows the stellar spectacle of a galaxy cluster still forming.

What is it?

The James Webb Space Telescope snapped this image of the galaxy cluster MACS J0553.4-3342 on July 3 using its near-infrared camera (NIRCam). The glorious, glimmering sight is actually a massive young galaxy cluster forming 4.4 billion years ago. A galaxy cluster is a grouping of galaxies held together by gravity. Galaxy clusters can contain hundreds or even thousands of galaxies and are the largest known structures in the entire universe that are held together in this way.

Why is it incredible?

Because light takes time to travel through space, and because the JWST can look incredibly far out into space, this telescope acts as a sort time machine.

This power isn't unique to the JWST, however. Other telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope, for instance, have similarly peered back in time through the cosmos and revealed some incredible, ancient sights. However, the JWST's specialized instruments like NIRCam allow the telescope to pick up incredibly faint light from galaxies remarkably far away. This greatly stretches how far back in time we can see.

But the really incredible thing is, you can look back in time yourself — with only your eyes. While JWST can look exceptionally far out into space and can capture the very faint light of ancient galaxies, the light coming from the stars you can see with your bare eyes also had to travel over incredible stretches of time to reach you. Think about this: the light coming from a constellation you love may have traveled across millions of light-years to get to your eyes.

Separated by billions of miles and shaped by very different environments, Saturn's smoggy moon Titan and the dwarf planet Pluto have, on paper, little in common.

Titan is a geologically active world cloaked in an atmosphere denser than Earth's, its landscape shaped by seas of liquid methane and vast dunes built from organic particles that rain out of its skies. Pluto, by contrast, is a frigid outpost with a tenuous atmosphere hovering above an icy, frozen surface.

Yet, observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed these two disparate worlds share an identical, unexplained infrared signature on their surfaces — a sign that similar chemistry may be unfolding on both worlds despite their stark differences, scientists say.

Detailed in a new study, the feature appears at precisely the same infrared wavelength on both Titan and Pluto, indicating that it absorbs light identically on both worlds. The signal points to the presence of an unknown compound, or a family of related compounds, that scientists have yet to identify.

"It's rather mysterious," Bruno Bézard, a planetary scientist at the Paris Observatory who led the discovery, told Space.com. "We cannot say what it is."

Chasing the signal

Bézard first spotted the unexplained feature while analyzing Titan observations from November 2022, when JWST gathered infrared light leaking through the haze in very specific, narrow wavelength bands, allowing scientists to peer directly through the otherwise opaque atmosphere.

To make sense of this light, researchers rely on spectroscopy, a technique used to identify compounds by the specific wavelengths of light they absorb. Because every molecule leaves behind a unique spectral fingerprint that telescopes can detect, astronomers can routinely identify substances across the solar system and beyond, ranging from simple water ice to complex molecules.

But the newly detected feature neither matches any of the standard library spectra cataloged so far, nor does it appear to be a fluke of the hardware, the study notes. The exact same absorption feature was detected by two different JWST instruments — the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) — ruling out the possibility of an instrumental artifact.

After failing to find a match with the cataloged spectral fingerprints of the simplest and most common planetary ices, Bézard wondered whether another world with similar atmospheric chemistry might hold a clue. He turned to his colleague Emmanuel Lellouch of the Paris Observatory, who had led a JWST program that had observed Pluto in May 2023.

"I asked him, 'Do you also have a signature [on Pluto] at this exact wavelength?'" Bézard recalled in the interview with Space.com. "So we looked, and we found that it is present there."

The ground truth

There is no evidence that the mystery molecule is a biosignature, Bézard said. Instead, it likely reflects the kind of prebiotic chemistry that has been operating in Titan's oxygen-free environment for more than 4 billion years.

One compelling possibility is that it belongs to a family of hydrocarbons known as allenes, which the study notes are essentially the only organic compounds known to exhibit strong absorption bands within the same 5-micron infrared range as the mystery signal.

But the allene family contains many complex variations for which complete spectra do not yet exist, Bézard said. Alternatively, the signature could belong to a known molecule whose spectral fingerprint has shifted, potentially because it is mixed with other planetary ices that have not yet been fully cataloged.

"We only have spectra for the simplest of them," Bézard said. "But it is possible that within this family you could find one or several compounds which are present together and make such an absorption feature."

Whatever the compound ultimately proves to be, he and his team believe it forms in the atmosphere through photochemical reactions before eventually "snowing" down onto the surface.

Despite their stark differences, both Titan and Pluto possess atmospheres dominated by nitrogen and methane. Scientists know from spacecraft observations and lab simulations that in the upper reaches of the planets' atmospheres, ultraviolet sunlight breaks these molecules apart, triggering a cascade of highly reactive chemical fragments. These fragments then reassemble into complex organic compounds, some of which condense and snow back down onto the surface below, which is where the JWST detected them.

A couple of different lines of evidence support this atmosphere-to-surface pipeline. First, the team analyzed how the signal behaved across Titan's disk. As the JWST scanned Titan from the center of its circular face toward its outer edge, or limb, the mysterious signal steadily weakened, the study notes.

"This is what you expect if it comes from the surface," said Bézard.

Because of the three-dimensional geometry of looking at a sphere, a signal coming from a flat surface will appear strongest at the center and grow fainter near the edge, where the angle of view through the atmosphere becomes longer and more obscured. This specific dimming trait was not shared by atmospheric carbon monoxide the team checked, which remained essentially unchanged from center to limb, Bézard said, which helped the team infer that this mystery molecule likely resides on the ground.

Pluto offered an independent line of evidence to back up this surface theory. Its near-vacuum atmosphere is physically too thin and sparse to generate an absorption feature of the observed depth, Bézard said, leaving the dwarf planet's solid surface as the only plausible source for the deep signature.

To further test their atmospheric-origin hypothesis, the team studied JWST observations of Jupiter's moon Ganymede. Because Ganymede lacks a nitrogen-methane atmosphere, it cannot run the same photochemical engine like Titan and Pluto do. Sure enough, the researchers found no trace of the mysterious feature, lending additional support to the theory that the compound is uniquely tied to the chemistry of nitrogen and methane skies.

Mapping Titan's surface

More clarity may arrive in the coming months. Researchers are currently analyzing newer JWST observations that provide a more complete view of Titan as it rotates. The data will allow the team to map the mysterious infrared signature across the moon's surface and determine whether it is associated with specific geologic features, such as Titan's vast organic-rich dune fields, which are continually replenished by a slow drizzle of complex particles produced in the atmosphere, Bézard said.

Further clues may have to wait for NASA's Dragonfly mission, a car-sized rotorcraft expected to launch in 2028 and arrive at Titan in the mid-2030s.

Although Dragonfly does not carry an infrared spectrometer to replicate JWST's light measurements, its onboard mass spectrometer will allow it to "taste" organic molecules across the various geologically interesting areas the spacecraft will fly to. By revealing which compounds are actually present on Titan's surface, the mission could give scientists a shortlist of candidates to replicate in laboratories back on Earth to see if they match the traits of the mystery molecule, Bézard said.

"It's always exciting when you discover something that was not seen before," Bézard said. "It's really the nicest part of our job."

The new study was accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

July 2026 marks four years since NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images were first revealed to the general public, marking a new era for astronomy. To celebrate this anniversary of the most powerful space telescope ever launched, NASA has released a stunning image of the strangely shaped galaxy called Centaurus A.

Located around 11 million light-years away, Centaurus A owes its unusual structure to a collision between two galaxies around 2 billion years ago. This merger provided the galaxy with an abundance of gas and dust, the raw material for intense star formation. It also supplied the supermassive black hole at the heart of this galaxy with an abundant supply of the same matter to feed upon and power a bright and violent central region, or active galactic nucleus (AGN), as that central area blasts out powerful, high-speed jets of plasma.

Though this galaxy is much closer to us than many of the early galaxies that the JWST has studied in its four years of operations, that doesn't mean it's any less useful. In fact, with its ultra-sensitive infrared vision, the JWST has been able to peer into the heart and inner workings of Centaurus A like no telescope that has gone before.

"No single telescope tells the whole story," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, division director of Astrophysics at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement. "Discoveries build over time, and new observatories expand on the foundations laid by earlier missions. The JWST represents the most powerful step forward yet, opening a window into wavelengths and details never before accessible.

"This allows astronomers to examine structures and processes that other telescopes could not see."

Building upon the legacy of Spitzer and Hubble

The key to the new view of Centaurus A that the JWST has been able to provide is the space telescope's powerful infrared vision. The thick dust that crowds the heart of this galaxy blocks visible light the Hubble Space Telescope previously relied on to study it. Infrared light is able to slip through these dense sheets of gas and dust.

The now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope had previously studied Centaurus A in infrared, but while it could resolve larger structures in the galaxy, it lacked the observational power to resolve individual stars and finer details.

However, even though the JWST has been able to use its MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) to study Centaurus A like never before, there are still mysteries to be solved about this structure.

For example, in the MIRI image of Centaurus A, alongside the glowing stellar nurseries where new stars are born and spit gas and dust into their surroundings, there is a curious S-shaped feature. Scientists still don't know how this structure was formed and if the active black hole at the heart of Centaurus A played a role in its creation.

The JWST images of Centaurus A do reveal plenty about the role this galaxy's central black hole plays in carving out its morphology. For example, the JWST was able to see fast-moving ionized gas being shunted outwards by the black hole’s activity. The JWST data also revealed warmer molecular hydrogen in a warped and rotating disk near the heart of Centaurus A.

This data seems to show how a galaxy's central black hole can trigger bouts of intense star formation by condensing gas and dust, but also how these cosmic titans can stunt star birth and "kill" their host galaxies by purging the raw material needed for the star-formation process.

That means that thanks to the JWST, scientists are now building a more comprehensive cosmic history of Centaurus A, promising discoveries that can be applied to other galaxies to build a better picture of how the universe has evolved.

Here's to another four years of cosmic discoveries.

Mysterious "little red dots" discovered in the early universe by the James Webb Space Telescope could harbor buried black holes that fire high-energy cosmic "ghost particles" through the cosmos.

Neutrinos are referred to as ghost particles because as chargeless and near-massless particles, hundreds of trillions of them stream through your body every second at nearly the speed of light. Plus, the source of high-energy neutrinos frequently detected on Earth is something of a mystery.

And another cosmic mystery is the existence of the "little red dots," which are galaxies that have been discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Though common around 600 million years after the Big Bang, these dots seem to disappear before the universe gets to 2 billion years old. Some researchers have theorized that these curious small galaxies could harbor black holes that are buried in thick shrouds of cosmic dust. If that is the case, then the dots could be a major contributor of high-energy neutrinos, linking these two mysteries.

Neutrinos are produced when other particles, such as protons, collide with particles of light, or photons, or with different sorts of matter. This usually occurs in gas-dense environments, but the ghost-like characteristics of neutrinos mean they have little trouble escaping into the universe at large.

Usually, the events that create high-energy neutrinos also give rise to high-energy photons called gamma-rays. However, neutrinos are so abundant as the second most common particles in the cosmos that if all sources of neutrinos also created gamma-rays, the gamma-ray background of our universe should be much greater than it actually is.

That means some sources of high-energy neutrinos must be located in environments from which gamma-rays can't readily escape — and that's where the little red dots enter the picture. These curious objects display very little emission associated with galactic jets or other outflows. This led this team to assume that the lack of these emissions, which should come in the form of X-rays and radio waves, is because the black holes and associated jets in Little Red Dots are buried in dense halos of dust and gas.

"In the scenario we considered, abundant photons and dense gas are expected to exist around the central black hole in a little red dot, which may allow such collisions to occur efficiently," team leader Riku Kuze of Kyoto University said in a statement.

Kuze and colleagues estimated the contribution that the little red dots could add to the universe's neutrino background. This revealed that, should particle acceleration be occurring in the buried black holes within the dots, these environments could produce high-energy neutrinos to contribute a significant fraction of the high-energy neutrino background observed on Earth. This would be while also suppressing gamma-ray escape.

"Although it is difficult to observe the individual objects directly, we believe this study is significant because it is the first to demonstrate that, given their abundance, these little red galaxies could account for a part of the observed high-energy neutrinos," said Kuze.

Neutrinos come in more than one type, or flavor; thus, the next step for the team will be to determine the ratio of neutrino flavors generated by buried black holes in the little red dots and to determine if this matches cosmic abundances witnessed.

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

PASADENA, California — NASA's new alien-hunting telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), will be serviceable out in space (and it will have gamma-ray detectors, to boot).

Do you remember seeing NASA's space shuttle astronauts working on the Hubble Space Telescope out in space? Well, it will likely be robots this time around, but NASA is planning for HWO to be serviceable, which means that they will need to figure out a way to work on, repair, and maintain the observatory while it operates roughly a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away.

"HWO will have to be serviceable to some extent," NASA's astrophysics division director Shawn Domagal-Goldman told Space.com during a session at the American Astronomical Society's (AAS) 248th meeting in Pasadena, California.

From Hubble to HWO

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is NASA's next planned flagship space telescope. But what separates it from previous space telescopes like Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is its purpose: to look for and study rocky, Earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars. In other words, to find planets that could hold life. The mission won't just hunt for aliens, but rather explore these habitable planets and their atmospheres, expanding our understanding of other worlds while also being used for a variety of astronomical purposes. And by making it serviceable, NASA will not just extend HWO's life, but it will also open the door for future technologies that can be used to enhance the observatory.

Hubble was a unique case. As the space telescope came about at roughly the same time as NASA's Space Shuttle program, and the telescope was designed to function in low-Earth orbit, it was a natural fit that astronauts go out to assemble, repair and maintain the observatory. "There were decisions made early on that the avionics would be modular in a way that astronauts could take the computer out and put a new computer in, or take a gyroscope out and put a new gyroscope in," former NASA astronaut and former NASA Chief Scientist John Grunsfeld, who today works independently as a consultant in the space industry, told Space.com.

However, HWO won't be so close to us. Instead, it will be located nearby L2, or the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, a point out in space roughly one million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away where the gravitational pull of the sun and Earth combine to keep objects in the same orbital period as Earth. This position, which is also home for the JWST, allows space telescopes to stay in sync with Earth, making communication easier. It also makes an astronaut mission quite difficult, if not nearly impossible with the technology we have today.

While the JWST was sent out to this distant vantage point without plans for servicing the telescope, HWO will "have to" be serviceable, according to Domagal-Goldman and further confirmed with NASA's press office. Servicing the observatory could look like anything from instrument swaps to regular maintenance or as-needed repairs, but it could also entail assembling the observatory itself. "If the telescope is too large to launch [fully assembled]," Domagal-Goldman added, it might need to be "assembled in space."

When the JWST went to L2, the mission team realized the problem with micrometeorites was a bit bigger than they anticipated. "We've learned that there's more micrometeorites and they're larger than we expected," said Grunsfeld, "and so you might be able to want to put a patch over a sunshield or a patch on a barrel to patch a hole — and, in principle, robotics could do that."

NASA has yet to confirm details about exactly how they plan to service the new observatory, which makes sense as the design of HWO itself is still in flux. But with L2 being so far away, it's logical to assume that it will need to be supported robotically, instead of with astronauts working out in space like with Hubble. We don't know what these future space telescope robot mechanics might look like, but they will have to be very capable to work on such a powerful observatory all the way out at L2.

"This will be by far the most challenging observatory that we've ever built," Grunsfeld said. "It's just remarkable that we are so bold as to think we can do it, and to be really close to showing that we can … so since we're just getting started, this is the time to have the discussion about should it be serviceable or not."

Science is the driving force

In addition to extending HWO's longevity by building it in a way that will allow it to be repaired out in space, making the observatory serviceable will also stretch its science capabilities in ways we can't yet imagine. If we look at Hubble's history, its instruments have been swapped out for newer, better versions over time that have not just allowed the telescope to continue functioning, it has allowed the telescope to evolve with changing technologies. From Hubble's gyroscopes to the Wide-Field Camera 3 swapped out in 2009, the telescope has benefitted from many technological upgrades. With servicing capabilities, the same could be true for HWO.

HWO is still fairly early in its development, and many years from launch (estimated for the 2040s). But NASA is laying the groundwork for this mission with the upcoming flagship mission the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. This mission carries with it a technology demonstration called the Roman Coronagraph Instrument. Essentially an "exoplanet camera," this instrument will block the glare of far-off stars, getting a direct look at the planets in their orbit. Roman will provide a proving ground for this next-gen coronagraph technology. But even if HWO launches with an advanced version of this coronagraph five , 10 or even 15 years following launch there could be even better planet-spotting technology available.

"I'm sure we will be highly motivated if we see a little rocky planet around a nearby star that kind of looks like Earth," Grunsfeld said, "we're going to be highly motivated to send a higher resolution spectrograph, or some different type of detector … up there as fast as we can. So that's the primary driver of servicing, is to be able to put in new scientific instruments."

By making HWO serviceable, NASA will enable the use of future technologies without having to launch entirely new space telescopes to support them. This is a cost-effective method, but it might also enable the deployment of future technologies that might otherwise not have a place to operate out in space.

"Imagine 20 years from now, or 25 years from now, that there'll be a robust space industry doing servicing, such that we could have a commercial servicer deliver new scientific instruments to habitable worlds," Grunsfeld said. They would simply "slide the old ones out, [and slide] the new ones in."

Speaking of future technologies, this decision to make HWO serviceable wasn't all that NASA revealed at AAS. Domagal-Goldman also shared that HWO will be equipped with Gamma-ray detectors. The specific details of these detectors and what they will be used for is also to-be-determined, but with HWO being serviceable, these detectors could continue to evolve with the observatory over time, enabling future astronomy that we can't even imagine today.

On July 4, the United States of America celebrates its 250th birthday, marking the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and becoming a sovereign nation.

Today, this relatively young country leads the way in our understanding of the universe. It's where many major players in space science, like NASA, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Northwestern University, to name just a few.

And to celebrate 250 years of the U.S. as an independent nation, Space.com takes you on a journey through some common misunderstandings of the universe through the years and the roles American scientists played in clearing up that cosmic confusion.

By 1776, Sir Isaac Newton's laws of motion had been around for about 89 years since the publication of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in 1687. Five of the solar system planets had been discovered by the Ancient Greeks long before the birth of the U.S. Also, after a long struggle and many attempts to stifle this knowledge, humans were made aware that the Earth orbits the sun rather than the other way around, with the final nail in this coffin of misunderstanding laid by Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543 and Galileo Galilei in 1610, receiving an extra hammer blow from Newton in 1687.

Galileo had also delivered us to the understanding that not only was Earth's place in the solar system unique, but it wasn't even the only planet to possess moons, with the moons of Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto discovered in 1610.

Clearly, by the time the U.S. was born we were already beginning to understand the universe and our place within it, but some major misunderstandings still persisted. One of the largest of these surrounded the nature of the sun itself.

The sun as a burning lump of coal

America was formed during the "steam age," a period of industrialization that lasted from 1770 to 1914. This revolution was driven by coal, powering locomotives, ships, and factories, changing the shape of industry, transportation, and manufacturing. At this time, coal was the densest and most powerful fuel source known to humanity, so it is perhaps little wonder that many early scientists theorized the sun was actually a tremendously massive lump of burning coal.

Then, one of the oldest and most prominent scientific periodicals in the world, the U.S.-based Scientific American, wrote a 1863 article that first began the pushback against the sun as a burning lump of coal.

"If the sun were composed of coal, it would last at the present rate only 5,000 years. The sun, in all probability, is not a burning, but an incandescent, body. Its light is rather that of a glowing molten metal than that of a burning furnace. But it is impossible that the sun should constantly be giving out heat, without either losing heat or being supplied with new fuel," the Scientific American article stated. "Assuming that the heat of the sun has been kept up by meteoric bodies falling into it, it is possible from the mass of the solar system to determine approximately the period during which the sun has shone. The limits lie between 100 millions and 400 millions of years."

Though this estimate was still miles out, we now understand that the sun is around 4.6 billion years old; this development came at a time of a geological revolution that was uncovering evidence that our planet was much older than theological estimates of just a few thousand years.

Around 57 years later in 1920, British scientist Arthur Eddington first suggested stars like the sun are actually powered by the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium. The idea was published by Eddington in his 1926 book, "The Internal Constitution of the Stars." Twelve years after this, nuclear physicist Hans Bethe formulated the first explanation of this nuclear fusion process, detailing the proton-proton chain reaction and the Carbon-Nitrogen-Oxygen (CNO) cycle.

The idea of the sun as a burning lump of coal finally burnt out 162 years after the formation of the U.S., a chain reaction kick-started by an American publication.

Ether or…?

During the infancy of the U.S. in the 1800s, scientists understood that light is a wave. Applying this to what they knew of other waves, it was logical to presume that light also needed a medium through which it could propagate. This medium would have to be ubiquitous and possess some unique properties to allow light to propagate through it at the speed of light.

Thus, it was proposed that space was filled with a medium called the luminiferous ether, with luminiferous meaning "light-bearing." The fact that this would have to be an invisible and infinite material that doesn't interact with physical objects made the existence of the luminiferous ether highly controversial.

We now know this medium doesn't exist, and that is thanks to two American physicists, Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley, who in 1887 delivered the most important null result in the history of science: disproving the existence of the luminiferous ether.

Should the luminiferous ether exist, then scientists reasoned that as the Earth orbits the sun at around 66,000 miles per hour (106,216 kilometers per hour), our planet should be moving through the ether, which had been deemed to be stationary. That meant Earth must be moving with respect to the stationary ether. And if the ether is the medium through which light waves ripple, this should mean the speed of light differs ever so slightly in the direction Earth is traveling.

Conducted in Cleveland, Ohio, the Michelson–Morley experiment used a piece of kit called a Michelson–Morley interferometer to test differences in speed for a wave of light traveling perpendicular to Earth and one traveling parallel to Earth. Michelson and Morley had expected to observe an interference pattern caused by the differing travel times of the light waves.

That is what happens when light of the same wavelength arrives at a detector at ever so slightly different times, meaning the peaks and troughs of the waves no longer perfectly align. However, to the surprise of the American physicists, no interference was detected. This meant no difference in the travel speed of light, essentially disproving the existence of the ether.

The negation of the luminiferous ether was of vital importance as it opened the door to Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity in 1905 and general relativity in 1915, the latter of which revised our understanding of gravity and led to our knowledge of black holes and gravitational waves well before the experimental observation of such objects.

Other galaxies!

Though scientists realized Earth isn't in the center of the solar system before the birth of the U.S., there was another glaring misconception. It was believed that the Milky Way, first proposed in Immanuel Kant's "Island Universe" theory in 1755, still occupied a unique position in the universe — with the existence of other galaxies a hotly debated topic. The solar system itself was also thought to be at the center of the Milky Way.

In 1785, astronomer William Herschel set about mapping our galaxy, correctly determining the disk-like shape of the Milky Way but incorrectly placing the solar system at its heart. This picture changed in 1918, when American astronomer Harlow Shapley determined that dense groups of stars called globular clusters are centered on a distant core in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation. This placed the solar system off-center in the galaxy. Today we've expanded upon this, moving our planetary system 27,000 light-years away from the Galactic Center and onto one of our galaxy's spiral arms.

It was five years later, in 1923, that the uniqueness of the Milky Way was shattered. Using the 100-inch (2.5-meter) Hooker telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory, American astronomer Edwin Hubble imaged the Andromeda nebula (Messier 31) and determined that it was at least a million light-years away. Though we now know this distance is closer to 2.5 million light-years, it was still enough to place M31 outside the boundary of the Milky Way.

The fact that the Andromeda nebula is actually the Andromeda galaxy, a distant and separate galaxy from our own, was announced to the public via The New York Times in Nov. 1924. We were no longer alone galactically — but Hubble wasn't done.

The universe is not static

Another assumption at this time was that the universe was static, something supported by Einstein in 1917. However, in 1929, Hubble discovered that the light from distant galaxies was being redshifted. In other words, the wavelengths of light emanating from these sources were being stretched as those wavelengths traveled toward us. This indicated that these galaxies are moving away from us. Convinced of this, Einstein abandoned his model of the static universe.

American scientists weren't done revising our entire picture of the cosmos, however. In 1998, U.S. researchers like Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Robert Kirshner were part of two international teams of researchers that discovered that not only is the universe expanding, but this expansion is actually speeding up.

Dark energy was introduced as the mysterious force driving this accelerating expansion. It remains today one of the most pressing mysteries of the cosmos.

Possibly by the time the U.S. celebrates its 300th birthday, the mystery of dark matter will have been solved along with other cosmic puzzles such as the nature of dark matter. If this is the case, it is highly likely that U.S. projects like the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will put American innovators and scientists at the forefront of these developments, just as their predecessors have been for the last 250 years.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have spotted a massive and densely packed galaxy cluster at "cosmic noon." The fact that this cluster is so highly evolved could change theories of cosmic evolution, as it seems to exist before such structures were thought to be possible.

Designated XLSSC 122 and first seen in 2014, the cluster immediately stood out to the team in James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data because, being so large and concentrated, it resembled the galactic clusters found much closer to our own galaxy. However, this cluster is seen as it was around 10.4 billion years, just around 3.4 billion years after the Big Bang, a time when such structures were theorized to have only just begun to assemble.

Even more excitingly, XLSSC 122 is acting as a gravitational lens and is aligned with even more distant galaxies, amplifying their light and making them easier to study.

"When we got those first images back from JWST, we said, 'wow, look at this, there's strong lensing coming from this cluster!' XLSSC 122 has now set the record for the most distant galaxy cluster displaying strong lensing, which is a valuable tool for astronomers," team leader Kyle Finner of the California Institute of Technology said in a statement.

What is gravitational lensing and why is it so useful?

Gravitational lensing was first predicted by Albert Einstein in his 1915 theory of gravity, known as general relativity. General relativity says that objects with mass cause the fabric of space and time to warp. Think of this as being akin to placing a bowling ball on a stretched rubber sheet. Gravity arises from this curvature.

The greater the mass of the object, the more extreme the curvature and thus the greater the gravitational influence of that object.

But there is another consequence. Light normally travels in a straight line, but spacetime is the track that it follows. If spacetime is curved, then the path of light is also curved. The closer that light travels to an object of great mass, the more its path swerves.

That means when an object of great mass, in this case XLSSC 122, comes between Earth and a more distant light source, light from that background source arrives at our telescopes at different times based on the path it took around the intermediate object. This amplifies light from the background source and has been used by the JWST team to great effect in the study of ancient galaxies.

When the Hubble Space Telescope previously studied XLSSC 122, it wasn't able to capture images that showed it was a strong gravitational lens; it took the tremendous observing power of the JWST to determine this.

The strong lensing of this early galaxy cluster could also help unravel the mystery of dark matter. Effectively invisible because it doesn't interact with light, dark matter does interact with gravity. Plus, because it outweighs the "ordinary matter" that makes up stars, planets, moons, and gas clouds in galaxies by a ratio of five to one, dark matter makes the largest contribution to the lensing effect of galaxies and galactic clusters like XLSSC 122.

This means that gravitational lensing can be used to study the distribution of otherwise invisible dark matter in galaxy clusters, which is a vital element of galactic evolution, as it is thought that galaxies and galaxy clusters gather along vast filaments of dark matter. The hunt is now on for more lensing clusters like XLSSC 122, and if they are found so early in the universe's history, a major revision of cosmology may be on the cards.

"Strong lensing is a way to measure the dark matter without actually seeing the dark matter. It gives us a sensitive probe of our cosmological models,” said Finner. "It's still early in the JWST era, and if we can start to get data on tens or hundreds of these types of objects at this stage in the universe, then we can really start putting our cosmological models to the test."

The team's results were presented on June 17, 2026, at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The research is available as a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

An intense demolition derby of at least six galaxies smashing into one another has been found lurking in the early universe by the James Webb Space Telescope. This merger is also expected to fuel the growth of a supermassive black hole and trigger the formation of what will eventually become one of the most massive galaxies in the cosmos.

"What makes this special is that we can follow both the build-up of a giant galaxy and the growth of the black hole at its center," Huub Röttgering, an astronomer at the Netherlands' Leiden Observatory, said in a statement.

The discovery came after a tip-off from radio astronomers who had noticed emissions that seemed to be coming from an undiscovered active black hole. When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) looked closer, it found a surprise.

"We didn't find a single galaxy, but an entire complex of at least six galaxies," said Aayush Saxena of the University of Oxford.

These six galaxies sit at a redshift of 4.0, which equates to a time about 12 billion years ago, just 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang.

Through the vision of the JWST's Near-Infrared Camera the six galaxies appear fuzzy, reminiscent of a faraway version of Stephan's Quintet, which is a collection of five galaxies, four of which form a compact group that are on course to merge to become a giant elliptical galaxy.

Similarly, the six galaxies spotted by the JWST, and collectively termed TGSSJ1530+1049, will undergo a series of rapid mergers to become what is known as a 'brightest cluster galaxy,' which is an enormous elliptical galaxy of the kind found at the center of galaxy clusters.

"We call structures like this protoclusters: the precursors of the vast collections of galaxies we see today," said Leiden's Roderik Overzier. "These are places where matter came together very early on. We think we are seeing a rare moment when several massive galaxies still exist separately, but are already in the process of forming one much larger galaxy."

Already a supermassive black hole has formed at the heart of this galactic maelstrom, and radio observations with the European VLBI (very long Baseline Interferometer) Network and the U.K.'s e-MERLIN (enhanced Multi-Element Remotely Linked Interferometer Network) at a resolution on the scale of a 100 milliarcseconds have identified radio lobes and hotspots typical of an active black hole's jet interacting with the gas surrounding it.

"Using a network of connected radio telescopes, we were able to produce a very sharp image of TGSSJ1530+1049," said Krisztina Gabányi of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. "The radio emission is produced as material falls into the black hole, while some of it is expelled again at high speed."

The jet doesn't seem to extend as far as all the galaxies in TGSSJ1530+1049 yet, implying that the black hole is still fairly young.

The six galaxies of TGSSJ1530+1049 span a volume only a few tens of thousands of light-years across, which is smaller than our Milky Way galaxy — and yet, they pack in a humungous amount of stars, equivalent to hundreds of billions of solar masses and a star-formation rate somewhere between 70–163 solar masses per year. That's a frenetic pace compared to the Milky Way, which produces much less than ten solar masses per year.

TGSSJ1530+1049 is one of the densest collections of heavyweight galaxies found in the early universe so far, and is giving exciting clues as to how the most massive galaxies, clusters and black holes in the universe formed.

The JWST observations are reported in The Open Journal of Astrophysics, while the radio measurements are described in a paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is finding clues that are leading scientists closer to understanding the origins of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.

What is it?

Comet 3I/ATLAS captured the world's attention when it was discovered nearly a year ago on July 1, 2025. The comet was first spotted by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), and is only the third interstellar object every discovered.

The comet swooped through our solar system, passing by Earth at a far (and safe) distance on its tour of our cosmic neighborhood. It is on a long trajectory that will take it out of our solar system, never to return.

In observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists were able to look in the direction the comet as it began moving away from the sun in December of last year. While in close proximity to our star, the sun's heat warmed the comet, making it extra bright and easy to observe.

With this view, astronomers were able to calculate some of the ratios of the chemicals present in the comet. This further highlighted that the object is from out of our solar system, as they found ratios of carbon and heavy hydrogen not found in comets in our solar system.

Researchers described their results in a new paper published June 22 in the journal Nature.

Why is it incredible?

Being only the third interstellar object ever found, people were excited about 3I/ATLAS. They were so excited, in fact, that conspiracies about the object sprouted up quickly. Due to it being from outside of our solar system, some claimed that the comet could be some sort of alien spaceship, similar to the initial suspicions about the interstellar object 'Oumuamua found years earlier.

But with new information coming in from space telescopes, and astronomers eager to understand this object better, these clues are leading us closer and closer to the true origins of this strange comet.

A huge, shining bauble of stars called Terzan 5 could be a clump of our galaxy's central bulge that hasn't been smoothed out into the mix, and has instead survived as a fossil relic leftover from the birth of the Milky Way galaxy.

"Terzan 5 may provide direct evidence that can help explain how bulges formed in galaxies throughout the universe," said Barbara Lanzoni of the University of Bologna in a statement. Lanzoni is a member of a team of astronomers, led by Bologna colleagues Giorgia Zullo and Francesco Ferraro, who tackled Terzan 5 with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Terzan 5 is a globular cluster — a huge sphere of stars with a total mass two million times greater than our sun's and a total luminosity 800,000 times greater. The problem is, Terzan 5 lies about 18,800 light-years away in the bulge of the Milky Way galaxy. This means dense lanes of intervening galactic dust block our view, significantly dimming Terzan 5's apparent brightness. That's why it wasn't discovered until 1968 by the Turkish–French–Armenian astronomer Agop Terzan.

Globular clusters tend to be ancient. They also tend to have formed all their stars in one giant burst. As such, all their stars should be the same age, 12 to 13 billion years old. Yet, a select few globular clusters show evidence of having more than one generation of stars. These include Omega Centauri, NGC 2808 and NGC 1783 in the Milky Way galaxy, as well as NGC 411 in the Small Magellanic Cloud and NGC 1696 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Several explanations have been put forward, including the possibility that they are the core remnants of dwarf galaxies that have been stripped of most of their stars by gravitational tidal forces emanating from the Milky Way. Or perhaps these clusters were simply massive enough to retain some molecular gas for future stellar generations.

When the Hubble Space Telescope took a look at Terzan 5 in 2009 and then again in 2016, it found that it too was among the ranks of weird globular clusters with two generations of stars, dating back 12.5 and 4.7 billion years. However, because it is behind so much galactic dust, not even Hubble has the clearest of views.

The JWST, however, does. Its near-infrared vision can see through the dust.

"Webb's new near-infrared observations, cross-referenced with Hubble's archival observations, have given us a much clearer picture of the history of Terzan 5," said study leader Giorgia Zullo, who is a Ph.D. student at Bologna.

The JWST detected two further generations of stars, one generation born 3.8 billion years ago and another 2.5 billion years ago. Four generations of stars is hard to explain for any globular cluster, which is why the team think that Terzan 5 could be something more primordial: a leftover building block of the Milky Way's bulge that was never quite assimilated by our galaxy.

"For some reason, this peculiar clump of stars formed separately from the bulge and was not destroyed as the bulge itself formed," said Ferraro. "Terzan 5 is what we now call a bulge fossil fragment because it resembles the primordial clumps that contributed to the formation of the bulge."

Disk galaxies sport two main components: a relatively narrow disk formed from spiral arms, and a bulbous core called the bulge. Galactic bulges tend to be the oldest parts of galaxies, forming billions of years before the disks, at least in the Milky Way's case. The JWST is seeing this process occurring in the early universe, revealing clumpy, young galaxies, but given the great expanse of space and time that JWST is looking across, the observations of the building blocks that go into making these galaxies are still not totally clear. With Terzan 5, we could be looking at one of the building blocks of the Milky Way's bulge relatively close-up, and it could provide new insights into the birth of our galaxy.

Terzan 5 is probably not the only bulge fossil fragment either. As well as those other aforementioned globular clusters, some of which might be fossil fragments and others might be the cores of dwarf galaxies, the globular cluster Liller 1 close to the center of our galaxy shares many of Terzan 5's properties, including its high abundance of heavy elements produced by multiple generations of stars that have died either in supernova explosions.

The team are now looking to chase up another 40 or 50 globular clusters in the bulge to see if they could also be bulge fossil fragments, or whether they are just regular globular clusters.

The findings were presented at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California which took place between June 14 and June 18. A paper describing the JWST observations has also been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The image of the day for Monday (June 22) shows the star-forming clouds of Orion A in stunning detail.

Released as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Picture of the Month, the image further demonstrates the impact the $10 billion space telescope has had on our view of the cosmos since it began operations in July 2022.

What is Orion A?

Located around 1,300 light-years from Earth and situated to the south of Orion's Belt in the night sky, Orion A is one of the largest and closest molecular clouds to our planet. Shaped like a filament, this structure of gas and dust is around 290 light-years long.

Part of the Orion molecular cloud complex, Orion A is a packed stellar nursery. Over the last few million years alone, it is estimated that Orion A has given birth to around 3,000 stellar objects.

The molecular cloud is also host to many young protostars surrounded by platters of gas and dust called protoplanetary disks, which, as the name suggests, will form planets. Thus, studying regions like Orion A could be key to understanding how the solar system came to be around 4.6 billion years ago.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered that the well-known "Pink Planet" harbors a salty surprise and an exotic atmospheric chemistry. The discovery marks an advancement in the study of cold objects beyond the solar system.

Initially discovered in 2013, GJ504b orbits a sun-like star located around 57 light-years from Earth. With a mass around 25 times that of Jupiter, this Pink Planet may not be a planet at all despite its moniker. It may instead be a brown dwarf, a failed star that formed like a star but was unable to gather enough mass to achieve the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium in its core. Thus, astronomers refer to it as a "planetary-mass companion," which means a planet-size object orbiting a parent star.

GJ504b remains one of the coldest planetary-mass companions discovered using ground-based telescopes, with a temperature of around 550 degrees Fahrenheit (290 degrees Celsius). Although, that still makes it hot enough to bake bread. Now, James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data reveals it has a key ingredient for bread making too: salt located in its atmospheric clouds, unlike anything astronomers have seen before.

"The Pink Planet is the coldest companion ever discovered using ground-based instruments," team leader Aneesh Baburaj of Northwestern University said in a statement. "Many teams all around the world performed follow-up observations to study its light, but it was too faint for ground-based instruments. That made it a perfect target for JWST.

"When we finally obtained its spectrum, it immediately looked interesting. But once we started digging deeper into the data, we realized it was not like anything we have analyzed before."

The Pink Planet is cold and old

The team studied this planetary companion by measuring its faint electromagnetic radiation emissions and filtering out the bright glare of its parent star.

They found the relative coolness of the Pink Planet is a result of the planet's age. Both gas giant planets and brown dwarfs are born blisteringly hot but cool off as they get older. This new research estimated that GJ504b is between 2.5 billion and 4 billion years old.

Breaking down light from the Pink Planet into individual wavelengths, the team was also able to determine its chemical composition. This is possible because elements absorb and emit light at characteristic wavelengths, meaning they leave "fingerprints" on light passing through their atmospheres.

"In the past, other astronomers observed the companion for an entire night with some of the biggest telescopes in the world to obtain a spectrum," Baburaj said. "And they could not see the object. With JWST, our entire observation took around two hours, and we were successful."

The JWST data revealed a rich cocktail of chemicals in the atmosphere of the Pink Planet that included water, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia. However, these observations didn't match modeling of the planetary companion's atmosphere until the team factored in something completely unexpected: clouds of salt deep in the atmosphere.

"We ran simulations with clouds, and the results aligned with what we know about cold planets," Baburaj said. "We tried three different types of clouds, and salt clouds fit best. When we accounted for salt clouds, it subdued the signature of molecules hidden deeper in the companion’s atmosphere. Then, the results became physically possible.

"This is the first time we've found that salt clouds are critical to explaining the spectrum of an object. It's a good reminder to account for clouds in our models."

Though this mystery may be solved, there are still questions surrounding GJ504b that will only be solved with further investigation. The Pink Planet seems to be unusually rich in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which astronomers call metals. This means the team still can't pin down the origin of the Pink Planet; did it form like a planet, or like a star?

That means they aren't quite ready to determine if GJ504b is a gas giant planet or a brown dwarf... or should that be Pink Dwarf?

The team's research was published on Thursday (June 18) in The Astronomical Journal.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope may be close to solving the mystery of "little red dots" in the early universe. The team has studied one of these strange objects, designated GLIMPSE-17775, finding evidence it is a black hole star — a ravenously feeding, growing supermassive black hole cocooned in a dense cloud of partially ionised gas.

Little red dots first started to turn up when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began sending data back to Earth in the summer of 2022. They were said by some scientists to have "broken cosmology" because they appear in large numbers around 600 million years after the Big Bang, but they appear to disappear before the universe reaches 2 billion years old. Several explanations for little red dots have been proposed, but one that has emerged as a frontrunner is the concept of black hole stars. If black hole stars exist, the little red dot disappearance would be the result of their intense, short-lived growth spurts that cause them to burn out — or, because the growing supermassive black holes at their centers eventually clear away the dense gas and dust obscuring them, changing their appearance as they evolve into more typical active galaxies.

The problem is, however, that astronomers have been unable to gather observational evidence that little red dots are indeed black hole stars. That was until the JWST imaged little red dot GLIMPSE-17775, seen as it was just 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang, while making observations of the gravitational lens galaxy cluster Abell S1063. This data represents the deepest spectrum of light from a little red dot collected to date and, according to this team, contains multiple lines of evidence pointing to a black hole star.

"I think part of the scientific community is converging on a singular picture — that little red dots can be explained by black hole star models. But none of the previous little red dots have all of the pieces of evidence in the same place," Vasily Kokorev at the University of Texas at Austin said in a statement. "With GLIMPSE-17775 we can test these models because of how deep and amazing this source's spectrum is."

Solving the little red dot puzzle with a hand from Einstein

The JWST caught a glimpse of GLIMPSE-17775 while searching for the first generation of stars in our universe, somewhat confusingly called "Population III" stars. The telescope searched for these particular stars in the galaxies that comprise galaxy cluster Abell S1063.

Separately, Abell S1063 is a gravitational lens, meaning its massive gravitational influence actually curves the fabric of space and time (united as a single, four-dimensional entity called spacetime). This, in turn, means an object "behind" the galaxy cluster that's emitting light toward our vantage point would have its light path curved in tandem with the spacetime curve. This can create a magnifying effect.

The concept of gravitational lensing was first predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity, and it's how scientists were able to observe GLIMPSE-17775 — essentially turning 30 hours of observing time into just about 80.

"When we saw the spectrum for the first time, it was like having all the pieces of a puzzle scattered on the floor," Kokorev said. "We picked up each piece of the puzzle, measured the lines, and started combining the different pieces into a mosaic. Maybe a few pieces looked like nothing at first, but then a couple of them came together, and we realized that there was something there."

The team identified several lines of evidence in the JWST observations that indicate "little red dot" GLIMPSE-17775 is indeed a black hole star. This includes emissions from elements that don't conform with what would be expected in a rotating gas cloud. The emission lines instead indicate the scattering of electrons, which is expected when a source of radiation is enshrouded by a vast and dense cocoon of gas. Also indicative of a dense shroud of gas were signs of fluorescence and helium-absorbing radiation.

The team also saw spectral lines from iron, which the team dubbed an "iron forest." That is something expected as a result of the high-energy output of a rapidly feeding supermassive black hole: a black hole star.If little red dots are rapidly accreting supermassive black holes shrouded by dense gas envelopes, this would explain why these mystery objects are so faint in X-rays, as these cocoons should absorb this high-energy radiation.

There is something missing from observations of GLIMPSE-17775, however.

Little red dots usually have a strong characteristic dip in the spectra of light they emit, what's known as a "Balmer Break." The team thinks this feature is weaker for this little red dot than others because GLIMPSE-17775 is surrounded by a massive host galaxy. The team's data therefore fits as a missing piece of the puzzle of little red dots, slotting in nicely with our understanding of the evolution of the universe.

"Everything fits, nothing is broken, and I think that makes the puzzle that is our universe even better," Kokorev concluded. "Looking ahead, I’m eager to dive deeper and learn about what is powering the central engines of little red dots. While we think it’s a black hole, there are some other interesting theories being proposed, which is exciting. "Maybe in a year or two, we’ll have the final answer to what powers these sources."

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

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have "weighed" a sleeping giant — a dormant supermassive black hole located a staggering 10 billion light-years away. That makes this black hole the most distant supermassive black hole scientists have ever measured the mass of.

The supermassive black hole is located at the heart of the galaxy MRG-M0138, which is seen as it was when the universe was just around 4 billion years old — and we now know, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), that it weighs an incredible 6 billion times the mass of the sun.

Supermassive black holes can be very conspicuous when actively feeding and therefore surrounded by a wealth of matter in a region called an active galactic nuclei (AGN). Because of the black hole's immense gravitational forces, an AGN glows very brightly. However, because black holes are surrounded by a light-trapping boundary called an event horizon, dormant black holes with larders that aren't quite so well stocked are far more elusive. They're practically invisible. Still, even these black holes have gravitational influences that can impact more than the swirling platters of gas and dust — that influence can also affect the motion of stars orbiting the black holes. And those stars are indeed visible.

To detect and measure the mass of this supermassive black hole, the team behind this research used the JWST to track the motion of stars at the heart of MRG-M0138. This star-tracking trick has been used in the past to weigh dormant black holes much closer to Earth — for example, the 4.3-million-solar-mass supermassive black hole at the heart of our own galaxy, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). However, Sgr A* and its attendant stars are just 26,000 light-years away, and the most distant black hole this technique, called stellar dynamics, had been used to weigh was located just 700 million light-years away. At about 15 times that previous record-holding distance, this new research is the first time it has been successfully employed to measure the mass of such a distant sleeping giant.

"Determining how stars collectively move within the core of this distant galaxy has allowed us to measure the mass of its otherwise undetectable supermassive black hole," team leader and University College of London scientist Richard Ellis said in a statement. "By demonstrating the feasibility of such a technique for galaxies in the early universe, we can now undertake a more complete census of how black holes develop over time and infer their role in shaping galaxy evolution."

However, determining the motion of the stars at the heart of MRG-M0138 was anything but straightforward. It required a natural cosmic phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, which emerged from Albert Einstein's magnum opus theory of gravity, known as general relativity.

What is gravitational lensing?

General relativity predicts that objects with mass create an actual curvature in the fabric of spacetime, the four-dimensional unification of the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time. Gravity emerges from this curvature, and because the larger the mass, the greater the curvature, the larger the mass of an object, the stronger its gravity.

Gravitational lensing occurs when a massive object such as a galaxy or a cluster of galaxies sits between a more distant foreground object and Earth. As light from a background source passes the curvature of space caused by the massive foreground object, or gravitational lens, its usually straight path becomes curved.

The closer to the gravitational lens light passes, the more its path is diverted, and that means that light from the same object reaches our telescopes at different times. This can magnify the object and, in extreme cases, can make the same object appear multiple times at different positions in the same image.

The gravitational lensing effect of a galaxy between MRG-M0138 and Earth refocused the light from that distant galaxy, magnifying it by 30 times, allowing Ellis and colleagues to intricately reconstruct the internal details of MRG-M0138.

"By combining JWST data with gravitational lensing, we could peer inside the black hole’s sphere of influence, where its gravity boosts the speeds of stars," Andrew Newman of Carnegie Science in Pasadena, California, said. "This is one of the best techniques we have to weigh a black hole, so we were excited to extend it to a much earlier period in cosmic history."

In addition to investigating this dormant black hole, the team also determined that MRG-M0138 itself is dormant, meaning it is no longer forming new stars. This is likely the result of the supermassive black hole undergoing a ravenous feeding frenzy earlier in its history when it would have appeared as a blazing quasar at the heart of an AGN. The energy released during this phase would have pushed gas and dust away from both the black hole, ending its feeding phase, and from MRG-M0138 itself. This would deplete the galaxy of the raw material for star formation, thus quenching its stellar birth rate.

This means that with these observations, and with more JWST dormant supermassive black hole data, scientists can better understand the relationship between galaxy growth and supermassive black hole growth, as well as the role these cosmic titans play in cutting off star formation in their host galaxies.

The team's research was published on Thursday (June 4) in Science.

On May 22 at Heft Gallery in New York City, "Redshift" transformed a gallery space into an existential experience for an intimate audience. The immersive audiovisual performance, created by artist Ashley Zelinskie and DJ/Producer illich Mujica, blended live electronic music, custom-coded visuals, NASA-inspired imagery and spoken-word narration into a cosmic ride through light and sound themselves.

The sold-out event opened with a listening session of NASA's Golden Record — the message launched aboard the interstellar Voyager probe in 1977 to offer a slice of Earth to any intelligent life that might encounter it. Played through the "Volumes" listening system designed by Joe Doucet, the opening moments set the tone for a performance rooted in science, art and wonder.

Drawing heavily from imagery captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, Zelinskie's visuals, projected on a wall of the gallery, shifted through wavelengths of light to simulate the astronomical phenomenon of redshift — the stretching of light across space and time. Mujica's live audio performance moved alongside the stunning visualizations, weaving together ambient electronica, psychedelic rock, and NASA-inspired spoken word samples to deliver a psychedelic event that was meditative and hypnotic at times.

In the conversation below, Zelinskie, Mujica and gallery owner Adam Berninger talk about how "Redshift" came to life, the Webb imagery behind the visuals, the inclusion of Pink Floyd's "Is There Anybody Out There?," and more.

Space.com: How did you decide which part of NASA's historic Golden Record would open the experience?

Adam Berninger: ​The evening began with a listening session from NASA's Golden Record, the sounds of Earth encoded on a disc and launched into deep space in 1977 aboard Voyager. A message from us to whatever might be out there. We listened to the opening greeting from the United Nations followed by a selection of music.

The record was played on the Volumes listening system designed by Joe Docet, conceived as spatial listening instruments rather than conventional audio speakers. They're installed as the centerpiece of our "Transmissions" initiative, created to bring together important musical experiences with a range of systems-based fine artworks at our LES gallery, Heft. These events run from May 15 - June 12th.

Space.com: "Redshift" was shaped by both astronomy and sound design. How did the concept evolve between the two of you?

Ashley Zelinskie: Once Illich and I decided we wanted to collaborate on a Transmission, we met in my studio to come up with our concept. We liked the way sound and light are both waves (sometimes). Redshift occurs when light gets older, the waves stretch out and become longer or more red. This is similar to the Doppler effect with sound. During my time working alongside the Webb Telescope team, which is an infrared telescope for this very reason, I became familiar with this phenomenon. Our concept for "Redshift" ended up being "light in service of sound and sound in service of light."

We started our performance in the ultraviolet light spectrum and slowly shifted toward red. The music also shifted from long-wave, experimental sounds to higher BPM (Beats Per Minute) and more complete scores of music — short light waves, long sound waves / long light waves, short sound waves. The cross back and forth was important to us.

Space.com: The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) imagery throughout the performance was stunning. Which observations resonated most with you artistically, and why were they chosen?

Ashley Zelinskie: I am always drawn back to the first images. They will forever be my favorite. They made such a huge impact on my artistic practice because I watched the telescope be built and launched, and then had the honor of being at Goddard when the first images were released. They were the core inspiration for my exhibition Unfolding the Universe: First Light in 2021 at Onassis ONX Studio.

I made several visuals based on the cosmic cliffs of the Carina Nebula. One of my calmer visuals was the slow orbit and collision of Stephan's Quintet and for the end of the performance I had the pulsing beat of rings of stardust exploding from the Southern Ring Nebula.

I used a few new JWST images as well, including the MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) image of galaxy M77. Every visual had a background of stars trained off a LoRA of Webb deep fields. I used a few AI tools to create the visuals as well as wrote the VJ software used in the performance.

Space.com: Redshift blended live DJ performance, immersive sound design and custom visuals seamlessly. What tools and techniques powered the experience?

illich Mujica: I DJ'ed and mixed the audio spontaneously during performance time using curated playlists of my 25 year catalogue of DJ'ing. I was chopping, looping, time-stretching, adding FX and blending 4 channels of audio via Traktor Pro 4; choosing from my library of ambient and electronica (old and contemporary), Psychedelic & Indie Rock and samples from space-related podcasts and films.

On the hardware side of things I used a portable Traktor Z1 DJ mixer and sound card + an AKAI Pro MIDI keyboard to MIDI control and navigate my whole laptop DJ rig. While I use the mini MIDI keyboard to produce music while I travel, this time it functioned fully as a DJ controller. Both of our machines were MIDI-linked via Ethernet cable connection.

Space.com: A memorable moment of the night was the inclusion of Pink Floyd's "Is There Anybody Out There?" What drew you to that particular piece?

illich Mujica: That was my choice, and it was an in-the performance moment. I was frantically browsing through my psychedelic rock playlist before the music went to silence, hoping to find spacey/space-related songs. I was actually looking for David Bowie's "Space Oddity" at first and then I remembered about Pink Floyd's "Is there Anybody Out There?".

This isn't one of their most famous songs, it actually works as a bridge song in the album "The Wall" between "Hey You" (a well-known song of theirs), and "Nobody Home" on Volume 2 of that album. The themes of Pink Floyd's concept album "The Wall" revolve around aspects of alienation, trauma and self-isolation.

When I first heard "Is there anybody out there?" in my teenage years, I understood it as an inner monologue of the mind; that monologue of detachment someone could have when grappling with issues of mental health; but over time, after many years, for me, the theme of this song as I hear it, morphed into the age-old question of "is there life in other planets?".

I love playing this on listening sessions and felt the sonic ethereal and more-abstract qualities of it was a better fit than Bowie's song for the nature of our Redshift performance; specially as I knew I was about to mix in a sample from a podcast interview with the crew of the Artemis II expedition where one of the astronauts talks about whether or not there is life (or someone) out there.

Space.com: The spoken-word samples and narration added a cinematic layer to the performance. Can you talk about the voices and stories woven into the show?

illich Mujica: As I mentioned, it was a selection of samples I dug exclusively for the performance. On one hand I sampled a question a kid asked the crew of the Artemis II in the NY Times' podcast The Daily. The question was "is there life out there?" and one of the answers one of the crew members shared just blew my mind:

"If you look at the closest neighboring galaxy which is Andromeda - let's say there's another amazing civilization there with the most amazing telescope, looking at Earth right now while we are chatting - what do they see? - They see us a couple of thousand years ago, so … we are not here. That's our closest neighboring galaxy so it gives you an idea of how hard it is to look for life in the universe..."

This concept also tied in with the spirit of Redshift and light as a measurement of time. The opening sample is also from "The Daily," in the same interview they used the kid singing about going to the moon as their intro.

For "The Daily," the sample was about space travel — for me it was about that, but most importantly, we were about to travel into a sonic journey with Joe Doucet's "Volumes" sound art/sound system!

The other sample used is my friend Tory Stolper, whose spoken word poem is part of our song "Surya Rising." I was able to not only play my original song on this amazing sound system but also feature a never-before-played sample from her voice note messages, where she was unsure about the creative process of the song from her perspective, as a prelude to our song about to be mixed in.

It's one of my most famous songs (with her), and I knew my crowd and fans were waiting for this one to drop on the amazing sound system. It was a treat for them, but it also fit the cosmic nature of the performance.

"Surya Rising" (Surya = sun in San script) was a song I wrote about sunrises at Burning Man. It speaks to the feelings this cinematic sunrise evokes in the desert as we find ourselves on this amazing planet.

You can listen to the entire mind-bending performance on SoundCloud. Explore Ashley's artwork on her website, and dive into illich's musical journey here.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has made a weather forecast for the exoplanet WASP-94Ab, a world with clouds of sand in the morning that gradually give way to a clear sky at sunset.

It is the first time that the daily cycle of weather has been observed on a hot Jupiter exoplanet. Furthermore, the clear evening sky has provided astronomers with an unobscured view of WASP-94Ab's atmospheric composition, finding it to be closer to that of our own Jupiter than previous inaccurate measurements had suggested.

WASP-94Ab is located about 690 light-years from Earth and orbits one of two stars in a wide binary system. The planet is a gas giant 1.7 times larger than Jupiter and orbits its star every four days at a distance of 5.1 million miles (8.2 million kilometers) — close enough to be hotter than over 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit (1,200 degrees Celsius). Hence, we call such worlds "hot Jupiters."

Previous attempts to get a handle on the composition of hot Jupiters has been stymied by the fact that they are often very cloudy, which obscures much of the atmosphere. Unlike Earth's clouds of water vapor, a hot Jupiter's clouds are made of vaporized metals and rock, like giant flying sandstorms. In the case of WASP-94Ab, the clouds are composed of vaporized magnesium silicate.

"I've been looking at exoplanets for 20 years and general cloudiness has been a thorn in our side," David Sing of Johns Hopkins University said in a statement. "We've known for quite a while that clouds are pervasive on hot Jupiter planets, which is annoying because it's like trying to look at the planet through a foggy window."

But are hot Jupiters cloudy all of the time? Astronomers led by Sing put this to the test by watching WASP-94Ab with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as the planet transited, or crossed the face of, its star from the spacecraft's point of view. Using a technique called transit spectroscopy, the astronomers were able to watch as the light from the star was filtered through the atmospheric gases and clouds on the leading and trailing limbs of WASP-94Ab as it transited. Some of this light is blocked by gases in the atmosphere, and the wavelengths at which that light is absorbed gives away the identity of those gases.

Sing's team saw that on the leading edge, where it was considered "morning" with air flowing from the nightside to the dayside, there were plenty of magnesium silicate clouds. However, on the trailing edge where it was "evening" with air flowing back to the nightside, the clouds had disappeared, leaving an unencumbered view of the hydrogen-dominated atmosphere. Previous Hubble Space Telescope observations had not been able to split the absorption effects of the leading and trailing limbs, so it seemed as though WASP-94Ab had hundreds of times more oxygen and carbon than Jupiter does. Given what we know about how gas giants form, this seemed improbable.

However, by detecting the cloudless sky of the trailing edge the JWST was able to get a more accurate reading by removing the effect of the clouds, finding that oxygen and carbon were only five times more abundant than on our Jupiter.

So WASP-94Ab seems like a fairly ordinary gas giant planet after all, but why are the clouds clearing? According to Sing and his colleagues there are two possibilities. WASP-94Ab is tidally locked, meaning that it always shows the same face to its star, so it has one hemisphere of permanent daylight and one hemisphere of permanent darkness. Strong winds at the terminator between day and night could be blowing the magnesium silicate high into the atmosphere, where it forms clouds over the nightside. Winds then blow these clouds around to the dayside, where they gradually descend deeper into the planet where they can no longer be seen, only to be dredged back up when the magnesium silicate circulates back around to the nightside.

The alternative is that the magnesium silicate clouds are like morning fog on Earth, steadily dissipating over the course of the day in 2,200-degree-Fahrenheit heat.

"Not only have we been able to clear the view, but we can finally pin down what the clouds are made out of and how they’re condensing and evaporating as they move around the planet," said Sing.

He and his team then used the JWST to follow up on another eight hot Jupiters, finding a similar cycle of clouds on two of them, WASP-17b, which is a large but very low density world with a bloated atmosphere and orbiting backwards around its star, and WASP-39b, which is another low density world with an atmosphere unusually rich in water vapor as well as carbon and sulfur dioxide.

The next step is to expand the search for cloudy weather on exoplanets by looking at a greater variety of worlds, including one gas giant that is on a highly eccentric orbit that takes it from its star’s habitable zone to much closer in and then back out again. The dramatic changes in heating could drive all manner of powerful weather systems that could be visible to the JWST.

The clouds on WASP-94Ab, WASP-17b and WASP-39b were reported on May 21 in the journal Science.

Is this a galaxy or a movie poster for a sci-fi smash hit?

A new image captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope shows the galaxy Messier 77 (M77) in stunning new detail with beams of glowing light shining outward. And the secret behind its incredible glow? A black hole.

What is it?

The galaxy M77, nicknamed the Squid Galaxy, takes center stage in this striking new image snapped by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The galaxy's heart shines brightly in the image, with gleaming rays of light radiating from its center while gas and dust swirls around.

M77 is a barred spiral galaxy located about 47 million light-years from Earth and can be found in the night sky in the constellation Cetus. The galaxy is visible to skywatchers, with a magnitude of 9.6, you can typically spot it with the help of a small telescope.

Interestingly, while this object is a Messier galaxy, meaning it was catalogued by astronomer Charles Messier, it was actually discovered by another French astronomer named Pierre Méchain who told Messier of his discovery.

Why is it incredible?

The secret behind this ethereal glow is actually a black hole. Scientists think that at the heart of most galaxies lies a black hole, and in M77, its central black hole's intense gravity is pulling gas inward. This movement causes the gas to heat up, releasing radiation and glowing tremendously as we can see in this snapshot, according to a statement from NASA.

In addition to the glow, the image stands out because of the incredible rays of light shining from its center. But these lines of light aren't caused by the gravitational pull of a black hole, instead they are actually an optical effect caused by the telescope, according to the statement.

Whatever the reason behind its appearance, one thing is certain: this galaxy is truly breathtaking in this new image.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have mapped the "cosmic web" of galaxies — the largest structure in the universe — with unprecedented detail.

This is the largest James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) survey conducted to date, and is known as COSMOS-Web. It traces a network of galaxies back to when the universe was about 1 billion years old.

The cosmic web is the term scientists use to describe a skeleton-like framework of filaments and sheets of dark matter and gas along which galaxies gathered and evolved over time, which is punctuated by nearly empty voids. Thus, the cosmic web forms the architecture of the universe — it's a singular, intricate, far-reaching structure that traps galaxies and galactic clusters like flies strung along the sticky silk web of a greedy spider.

The results obtained by the COSMOS-Web team further demonstrate the power of the JWST to refine and redefine our view of the universe since the $10 billion space telescope began beaming data back to Earth in the summer of 2022.

"JWST has completely changed our view of the universe, and COSMOS-Web was designed from the start to give us the wide, deep view we need to see the cosmic web," leader of this research, Hossein Hatamnia of the University of California, Riverside (UCR), said in a statement. "For the first time, we can study the evolution of galaxies in cluster and filamentary structures across cosmic time, all the way from when the universe was a billion years old up to the nearby universe."

By the "nearby universe," Hatamnia means up to a distance of around 1 billion light-years. The solar system is estimated to be around 2 light-years wide, giving you an idea of just how far astronomers consider our cosmic backyard to extend. COSMOS-Web extends this by another 13 or so billion light-years.

That kind of depth of view is the only way astronomers can get a true picture of the cosmic web.

The large-scale structure delivered by COSMOS-Web provides a wealth of information greater than that provided by earlier maps of the same region of sky captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Team member and UCR scientist Bahram Mobasher explained that comparing Hubble and JWST shows that many cosmic structures had been "smoothed over" in data from the JWST's space telescope predecessor.

"The jump in depth and resolution is truly significant, and we can now see the cosmic web at a time when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, an era that was essentially out of reach before JWST," Mobasher said. "What used to look like a single structure now resolves into many, and details that were smoothed away before are now clearly visible."

The impressive leap in detail provided by the JWST and COSMOS-Web is the result of the unification of two of this powerful new space telescope's key strengths.

"The telescope detects many more faint galaxies in the same patch of sky, and the distances to those galaxies are measured far more precisely," Hatamnia said. "Each galaxy can therefore be placed into the correct slice of cosmic time, sharpening the map's resolution."

The team's research was published on May 6 in The Astrophysical Journal.

The Whirlpool Galaxy sprawls across the cosmos in this striking new snapshot from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The galaxy, formally known as M51 (Messier 51), stretches out its spiral arms, glowing brightly in the darkness of space. While the galaxy's many limbs have been spotted before by the Hubble Space Telescope and even amateur astronomers, this image captures a uniquely striking view of its galactic beauty.

What is it?

The Whirlpool Galaxy was captured in this image by JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), according to a statement. This is JWST's primary instrument for seeing the universe in near-infrared light, which is a range of the electromagnetic wavelengths just out of our eyes' reach.

By seeing in near-infrared, NIRCam was able to capture this incredible view of part of the Whirlpool Galaxy. Located in the constellation Canes Vanatici, the spiral galaxy is made up of long swirls of gas and dust speckled with stars.

Beyond being just a beautiful cosmic sight, the formations of dust and gas that comprise this galaxy are actually a star-forming region. Here, gases like hydrogen and dust are compressed, condensing into new stars.

Why is it incredible?

This image shows only a section of the incredibly expansive spiral galaxy. The galaxy's red and orange spiral arms bending outward can measure tens or even hundreds of light-years across.

The full galaxy measures an incredible 76,900 light-years across. While this is an enormous size for any object or region, our own Milky Way galaxy measures over 100,000 light-years in diameter. But size and distances get fairly massive when we're talking on a cosmic scale. The Whirlpool Galaxy is a whopping 31 million light-years away from our own, but it's still considered one of our closer neighbors.

Something that has made the Whirlpool Galaxy beloved is its visibility. With an apparent magnitude of +8.4, skywatchers and amateur astronomers using small telescopes or even just binoculars are able to spot the galaxy and its spiral shape.

Astronomers have captured an extraordinary new look at the hidden birthplaces of star clusters, uncovering fresh clues about how galaxies evolve — and how young planets may be shaped by their stellar environments.

Using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers studied nearly 9,000 young star clusters across four nearby galaxies: Messier 51, Messier 83, NGC 628 and NGC 4449. The newly released images reveal glowing clouds of gas and dust where thousands of stars are actively forming, while also highlighting the JWST's growing ability to uncover hidden galactic structure. Brilliant knots of newborn stars, dark rivers of dust and glowing cavities carved by stellar winds combine to create a vivid portrait of galaxies in constant motion.

While the JWST's infrared vision allowed scientists to peer through thick cosmic dust, Hubble traced older, fully exposed clusters in visible light. Together, the observations allow researchers to study star clusters from their earliest, dust-shrouded stages to fully emerged stellar groups, according to a statement from NASA.

"This work brings together researchers simulating star formation and those working with observations, as well as groups researching planet formation," Alex Pedrini, lead author of the study from Stockholm University and the Oskar Klein Centre in Sweden, said in the statement. "Using Webb, we can look into the cradles of star clusters and connect planet formation to the cycle of star formation and stellar feedback."

By developing simulations that account for stellar dynamics in emerging star clusters, researchers discovered the universe's largest star clusters break free from their birth clouds much faster than expected, dramatically altering their surroundings in the process. The team found that the most massive clusters cleared away their natal gas clouds in about five million years, while smaller clusters took up to eight million years to emerge — a relatively small difference that could influence how star formation unfolds within galaxies over time.

"Simulations of star formation and stellar feedback have struggled to reproduce how star clusters form and emerge from their natal clouds," said Angela Adamo, co-author of the study and Principal Investigator of the FEAST (Feedback in Emerging Extragalactic Star Clusters) program, which collected the observations used in the research as part of a broader effort to investigate how newly formed stars shape the galaxies around them. "These results give us important new constraints on that process."

Once freed from their birth material, these giant clusters unleash intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds that heat and disperse nearby gas — a process known as stellar feedback. Because cold gas is the raw material needed to form new stars, stellar feedback can effectively regulate future star formation inside galaxies.

The findings could also reshape scientists' understanding of planet formation. Young planetary systems developing around stars inside these clusters may become exposed to harsh ultraviolet radiation earlier than expected. That radiation can erode the disks of gas and dust surrounding newborn stars, potentially limiting how large planets are able to grow, according to the statement.

Their findings were published May 6 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have, for the first time, directly analyzed the surface of a planet beyond our solar system,

The James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) exoplanet subject, LHS 3844 b, is a so-called "super-Earth" about 30% larger than our planet and located nearly 50 light-years away. Unlike most exoplanet studies, which focus on atmospheres, astronomers analyzed heat emitted from this planet's surface.

The findings reveal a dark, airless world that may resemble Mercury. Scientists say this kind of direct interpretation of a distant planet's geology marks "the next step in unveiling their nature."

"Thanks to the amazing sensitivity of JWST, we can detect light coming directly from the surface of this distant rocky planet," Laura Kreidberg of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, who served as the principal investigator of the JWST observations, said in a statement. "We see a dark, hot, barren rock, devoid of any atmosphere."

Discovered in 2019, LHS 3844 b orbits a cool red dwarf star in just 11 hours and is tidally locked, meaning one side constantly faces the star while the other remains in darkness. The dayside reaches temperatures of about 1,340 degrees Fahrenheit (725 degrees Celsius), the scientists say.

In 2023 and 2024, Kreidberg and her team observed three secondary eclipses, when the planet moved behind its star. Using the JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), they measured the infrared light emitted from the planet's intensely hot dayside and used it to study its surface.

By comparing the signal with known rocks and minerals from Earth, the moon and Mars, the team ruled out an Earth-like crust rich in silica and granite. Such crusts typically form through water-driven geological processes and plate tectonics, which recycle rock and allow lighter minerals to rise to the surface, the study notes.

Instead, the data point to a surface dominated by basalt, a dark volcanic rock rich in iron and magnesium commonly found on the moon and Mercury, the researchers say.

"This planet likely only contains little water," study lead author Sebastian Zieba of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian in Massachusetts said in the statement.

One possible explanation, the researchers say, is that LHS 3844 b has a relatively young surface shaped by recent volcanic activity, where fresh lava has not yet been broken down by micrometeorite impacts. However, such activity is known to release gases such as carbon dioxide or sulfur dioxide, which were not detected by MIRI, the study notes.

"If present on LHS 3844 b in reasonable amounts, MIRI should have detected it," the statement read. "Still, it found nothing."

Alternatively, the planet may be covered in a thick layer of dark, fine-grained material formed over long periods by radiation and meteorite impacts, similar to the moon or Mercury. Without an atmosphere, the surface would be especially vulnerable to this process, known as space weathering, which gradually breaks down and darkens rock.

"This alternative relies on longer periods of geological inactivity, thereby requiring conditions opposite to the first scenario," the statement read.

Follow-up JWST observations are planned to further refine the planet’s surface properties and determine whether it is solid rock or loose, weathered material, the study notes.

"We are confident the same technique will allow us to clarify the nature of LHS 3844 b's crust and, in the future, other rocky exoplanets," Kreidberg said in the same statement.

A study about these results was published Monday (May 4) in the journal Nature Astronomy,

In its infancy, the universe had a bit of an identity crisis.

For the first few hundred million years, the vast cosmic gas between galaxies was primarily a chilly, dense affair. But then, it seemed to wake up, deciding to get all warm and fuzzy.

This strange shift in the cosmos’ early disposition is a crucial clue to how the very first galaxies burst into being, shaping everything we see today. The early universe, a mere whisper after the Big Bang, just a few hundred million years old — that's when the first stars and galaxies were starting to flicker on, like fairy lights across a cosmic dark.

The fuel for all this grand production: gigantic clouds of gas, mostly hydrogen. Astronomers have always suspected these baby galaxies were busy, but new glimpses from the James Webb Space Telescope are showing them to be even brighter and larger than our wildest dreams. They're like finding teenagers sitting in a kindergarten class, way ahead of their expected development.

This cosmic precociousness means our existing models of how galaxies form might need a serious tune-up. We thought we had a pretty good handle on how gas falls into dark matter halos, cools down, and then ignites into stars. But the JWST data suggests a much more aggressive, faster-paced star-making frenzy in those early days. The question becomes: How did these young galaxies manage such a booming business so quickly?

To untangle this mystery, Umberto Maio from the INAF-Italian National Institute of Astrophysics and the Institute for Fundamental Physics of the Universe, working with Céline Péroux at the European Southern Observatory, decided to dive into the virtual cosmos. They created incredibly detailed computer simulations, a sort of cosmic time machine called ColdSIM, to rewind the clock and watch how gas behaved in the first billion years after the Big Bang. Their goal was to make predictions about the early universe’s baryon budget — that's the accounting sheet for all the "normal" matter, the stuff stars and planets are made of, and where it ended up.

What they found was a universe in flux. Before a pivotal moment called the epoch of reionization — when the universe finally became transparent to ultraviolet light — the gas was indeed mostly cold. It was the perfect, dense environment for star formation. But as star formation really picked up, and that intense ultraviolet light started zipping around, things changed. The simulations showed that the gas quickly shifted, becoming dominated by a warm, less dense phase. It’s like the universe went from a quiet, cool morning to a bustling, sun-drenched afternoon, with all that energy from new stars and radiation heating things up.

This wasn't just a minor temperature change. It fundamentally altered the rhythm of galaxy evolution. The team's clever simulations traced the journey of various types of gas, carefully avoiding the usual shortcuts in models that can often lead to fuzzy answers. They found some eye-opening things about how these infant galaxies put themselves together.

For starters, the stellar return fraction was surprisingly low. This is the amount of material that stars eject back into the surrounding gas when they die, essentially recycling fuel for the next generation of stars. In the early universe, it seems, stars were less efficient at this recycling. Lower quantities of old stellar material returned to the gas, meaning that new stars largely formed from fresh, pristine gas constantly falling in from the cosmic web. It's a bit like a construction site that keeps getting new materials delivered rather than reusing much from demolished buildings.

But even with less recycling, these galaxies were burning through their gas at an astonishing rate. Maio and Péroux discovered that the depletion times — the time it would take for a galaxy to convert all its gas into stars at its current rate — were incredibly short. Much shorter than we see in galaxies today. This means that early galaxies were true star-forming machines, gobbling up gas and spitting out stars with a furious intensity. It paints a picture of baby galaxies throwing one heck of a tantrum, furiously making stars with every available bit of gas.

So, why does any of this matter? Because it rewrites a part of our cosmic origin story. Our initial predictions for these early galaxies, based on observations of later, more mature galaxies, simply weren't capturing this dynamic, rapidly evolving picture. It turns out that you can't just take what you know about middle-aged galaxies and apply it to their energetic youth. The physical processes, from gas dynamics to stellar feedback, are just too different when the universe itself is so young and compact.

Of course, this cosmic detective story is far from over. Numerical simulations are powerful, but they’re always battling with the sheer complexity of the universe. Modeling everything from the intricate, multi-phase structure of gas to the powerful winds blown out by massive stars and black holes is a huge challenge. There are still big uncertainties, like the exact initial mass function of stars (how many big stars versus small stars are born) and the precise amount of "metals" needed to kickstart cooling. Our models still have plenty of room to grow.

But the good news is, we’re armed with ever more powerful tools. The James Webb Space Telescope is out there, giving us sharper and sharper images of these distant, ancient galaxies. And coming down the pipeline are next-generation radio telescopes, like the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which will let us peer even deeper into the cold gas reservoirs of these early galaxies. These new eyes on the sky will give us the crucial real-world data needed to test these new theoretical predictions, helping us refine our models and paint an even clearer picture of the universe's chaotic, yet beautiful, beginnings.

The journey to understand how the universe built itself, one galaxy at a time, is still unfolding before us.

AI image processing has sped up analysis of data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope from years to mere days or less, ushering in an avalanche of ground-breaking discoveries that may otherwise never have been made.

And now, the technology will be used to enhance the quality of images taken by the Chile-based Vera C. Rubin Observatory, the newest astronomy power house, to make them appear as sharp as if they have been taken from space.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, named after the American astronomer who discovered one of the key pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter, sits atop the 8,770-feet (2,673 meters ) Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes. The telescope began operations last year. It scans the entire sky every three nights, aiming to create a 10-year timelapse of the motions of objects in the sky.

Its position in Chile's Atacama Desert, the most parched region on the planet, allows the observatory to benefit from a dry atmosphere and a year-round clear sky. Still, Rubin's observations suffer from significant distortions, as light from distant celestial objects must pass through Earth's atmosphere before it hits the telescope's detectors.

A new AI algorithm developed by researchers from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) will now attempt to remove this distortion and increase the resolution of the images to make them look as if they have been taken from space.

"Ground-based telescopes suffer from blurring owing to atmospheric turbulence as the light comes through," Brant Robertson, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC, whose team developed the new AI model, told Space.com. "We spend a lot of money on high-performance technology to remove that atmospheric distortion, but we can also train AI machine learning models to take out some of that blurring."

The researchers trained the generative model, called Neo, using images taken by the Subaru Telescope in Japan and snaps of the same sections of the sky captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The task for the model was to learn how to fill the details missing in the images taken from Earth. The results were impressive. The researchers said in a paper that the Neo model "improves the accuracy of measured morphological parameters by factors of 2-10."

In practice, that means an increased resolution that reveals a vast quantity of individual stars and precise shapes of galaxies where before one would find only vague smudges.

"The model improves the spatial quality of that data and recovers, in a statistical sense, the properties of galaxies that you see in these images as if they were seen by a telescope in space," Robertson said.

The technology, he added, super-charges discovery and enables the scientific community to maximize the scientific return on money invested into cutting-edge astronomical telescopes. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, fitted with a 27.6-foot (8.4 m) mirror, cost $800 million to build. That, however, is still only a fraction of the cost of space-based telescopes such as Hubble and James Webb, both of which cost billions to build and operate.

"We spend a lot of money, huge amounts of resources, on astronomical observatories, and we would like to leverage that investment by the public and by the community to get everything that we can out of the data," said Robertson.

The Neo model is a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network, a collaboration of two neural networks, frequently used for AI image generation. In the case of Neo, the first network generates improved images from the captured photographs; the other evaluates their quality.

The model is based on an earlier technology Robertson's team developed to speed up processing of images from Webb. The $10 billion astronomical powerhouse produces such vast quantities of data that it's impossible to keep on top of it using just visual assessment by human astronomers. AI algorithms, like the one developed by Robertson and his colleagues, accomplish what would have taken humans years, in mere days.

"We're being inundated with such an amount of data that it's very difficult to keep up with," said Robertson. "Our standard approaches to analyzing these images are just really not sufficient."

The algorithm, running on NVIDIA's GPU-powered supercomputers, has made some of the most jaw-dropping discoveries in the Webb era, including spotting complex galaxies in the earliest universe, which astronomers did not expect.

"The model analyzes every pixel and distinguishes whether it's part of the sky or a part of an object," said Robertson. "And if it's an object, is it a part of a disk galaxy or a spheroid galaxy or a part of a star?"

Robertson added that the algorithm is not replacing astronomers. Rather, it helps them make discoveries faster, and also detect patterns that they might overlook.

"AI is not going to be pure or complete, but of course, neither are humans and traditional methodologies. They all have different strengths and benefits," he said.

The astronomers are making the processed images available to other teams and the public to explore.

The paper describing the Leo model, which will help improve the resolution of images from the Vera Rubin Observatory, has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

GREENBELT, Md. — On Tuesday (April 21) here at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, I watched as scientists stood proudly around a metal contraption with towering orange solar panels and a sparkling silver base. Gleaming right before me in a sterile white clean room stood the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — at last, complete.

"I very much hope, and in fact, expect, that the most exciting science from Roman is going to be the things that we didn't expect, that we couldn't predict, but that will set the new deep questions for future missions to address," Julie McEnery, senior project scientist of Roman said during a press conference on Tuesday.

Named for NASA's first chief of astronomy and the first woman to hold an executive position at the agency, this space telescope should turn out to be yet another valuable tool in our species' hunt to understand the true nature of the universe. It'll stand among the ranks of our other powerful robotic eyes on the sky — famed instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), SPHEREx, the Euclid Space Telescope and even the aged but always impressive Hubble. Except, as is the case with each of those landmark observatories, this new one has its own specialty. We'll get into some of those specs soon.

Above all, now projected to launch in September 2026 — eight months ahead of schedule, and under budget — the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (or "Roman" for short) has the potential to show us pockets of the cosmos we've yet to touch.

According to NASA, Roman's primary mirror measures about 7.9 feet (2.4 meters) wide, which is similar to Hubble's. However, Roman has the ability to take images that capture a patch of the sky at least 100 times larger than Hubble can.

"Its surveying capabilities are over 1,000 times faster than Hubble, and can chart 200 times more sky in a single image," NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said during the conference. "What would take Hubble 2,000 years to process, Roman can do in a year — the images it captures will be so large there is not a screen in existence large enough to show them."

To put that into context, over its approximately 35 years of service so far, Hubble has gathered about 400 terabytes of data; once fully operational at its workstation in space, Roman should be able to create 500 terabytes of data per year.

As for what this data could hold, well, the possibilities are pretty endless. That's typically the gold standard for a telescope; as scientists like to say, we're always hoping to answer questions we never even thought to ask.

Cosmic and panoramic

Roman is specifically calibrated to capture images of the universe in visible and near-infrared light. Different telescopes view the universe in different light wavelengths. The JWST, for instance, specializes in infrared observations, while Hubble's powers allow it to see some infrared but mostly visible and ultraviolet light.

Diversifying in this way is important, because you can think of a patch of sky as having various layers. As an example, many extremely distant objects can be seen only in infrared light — which consists of super-long wavelengths that aren't visible to the human eye — so you need an infrared telescope to decode that layer. But there are also visible-light objects in the same patch of sky that need to be studied in greater detail, for which you need a telescope that behaves like an ultrapowerful human eye. And so on.

A few things set Roman apart, including that quick data-processing speed we discussed earlier.

Compared to the JWST, Roman's images — taken with its aptly named Wide Field Instrument (WFI) — will be 50 times wider but more shallow, because Roman doesn't need to access the deep universe the way the JWST does. As we discussed, it can't see infrared like the JWST can and therefore would be wasted in looking too far back.

More specifically, WFI is composed of a 300-megapixel visible-to-near-infrared imaging camera and slitless spectrometer (a special tool that allows scientists to capture light dispersion of objects in a field of view). But there is something uniquely special about that shallow, panoramic view.

It means scientists don't have to be as picky about which patch of sky they're looking at. They can just survey and hope to find a cool lead to zoom in on. This offers Roman the ability to catch events that transpire very quickly, such as fast radio bursts, and increases the chances that scientists can witness remarkable supernovas, colliding neutron stars and other easy-to-miss phenomena right as they happen.

"So we're going to see thousands of supernovae, and some of these are going to be further away than any supernovae we've ever seen before," Dominic Benford, program scientist for the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope told Space.com. "We'll trace the history of the universe through exploding stars."

There is also the hope that Roman helps us unravel one of the greatest mysteries of our universe — the details of its dark side.

The dark and faint universe

Despite years upon years of searching for an answer, scientists still don't know what exactly dark matter and dark energy are. All we know so far for sure is that our universe's normal matter does not appear to be enough to prevent galaxies from falling apart like horses on a merry-go-round that isn't nailed together properly, and that the universe is also accelerating in its continuous expansion far faster than seems normal. The former is explained by a substance called "dark matter" picking up where normal matter leaves off, and the latter is explained by "dark energy" driving that expansion.

These two substances collectively constitute 95% of the universe yet have never been detected with certainty. It's absolutely bizarre, if I may say.

Of course, with that kind of track record, it can't be known for sure whether Roman will suddenly reveal what the dark universe actually is — but if all goes to plan, we can expect it to bring us quite a bit closer.

Thanks to that lovely wide field of view, Roman will be able to rapidly image tons of galaxies to generate detailed, 3D vistas of the cosmos. It will therefore be able to show us things like the dynamics of different galaxies and track the universe's expansion — the two main ways we investigate dark matter and dark energy.

"We'll also study how the universe itself has expanded over time. And these are the keys to unlocking the fundamental nature of dark matter, dark energy, the fabric of the universe itself," McEnery said.

And that's not to mention what the Roman's other special instrument suite can do for science. For example, it has a coronagraph, a tool that can block the glare of distant suns and help the mission directly image exoplanets. In fact, NASA says this telescope's coronagraph can detect planets 100 million times fainter than their stars. That capability is about 100 to 1,000 times better than existing space-based coronagraphs, the agency explains in an overview.

"The Roman Coronagraph will be capable of directly imaging reflected starlight from a planet akin to Jupiter in size, temperature, and distance from its parent star," that overview states.

Road to launch

Now that Roman is complete, the next phase of its journey can soon commence. That'll include being shipped to the launch site, NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and undergoing any necessary launch-related testing.

A hefty amount of prelaunch testing has already been conducted on Roman so far, including the poor observatory being blasted with extreme sounds, being shaken up to an extreme degree, being exposed to extreme heat and extreme cold — and way more (all just as extreme). Sounds rough, but the point is to make sure Roman will be able to handle the rigors of launch and the most extreme environment we know of: space.

"Most of the stuff that's left are the final checkouts, and the final wrap-ups," Jeremy S. Perkins, Observatory Integration and Test Scientist for Roman, told Space.com "There is lots of blanket close-outs and making sure that we've put all the sensors on and taken off the ones that were there for testing."

As for launch procedures, once all aspects of testing are squared away, NASA has chosen a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket to carry this treasure to space. There have been 11 Falcon Heavy launches to date, with a 100% success rate for the 230-foot-tall (70-meter-tall) vehicle.

Once in space, after separating from that rocket, Roman will head to a stable point about a million miles away from Earth called Lagrange Point 2, or L2. This is a popular spot for our space explorers to end up because it allows them to remain shielded from the sun's heat while still orbiting in such a way that mission control can communicate with them easily.

Hopefully the JWST, Euclid and the rest of the L2 crew welcome Roman with open arms (solar panels?).

Correction 4/21: Julie McEnery's name has been updated to reflect the correct spelling.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have investigated an alien planet that could help define the line dividing planets and stars.

The curious exoplanet is 29 Cygni b, a gas giant with around 15 times the mass of Jupiter that lies 133 light-years away from Earth.

Most planets are thought to form via a "bottom-up" process that sees tiny clumps of rock and ice coming together to gradually grow a world. However, bottom-up processes struggle to account for the formation of planets with as much mass as 29 Cygni b.

Such giants are thought to form instead via a top-down process — the direct collapse of dense patches of gas and dust in the protoplanetary disks that swirl around infant stars. That's the same way that stars themselves form, from dense patches in much larger clouds of interstellar gas and dust.

Now, JWST has collected multiple lines of evidence that suggest there is a way that huge planets such as 29 Cygni b could form via bottom-up processes, just like their more diminutive counterparts.

29 Cygni b sits on the dividing line of formation processes. Though its large mass suggests a top-down process, its wide orbit — an average distance from its star of 1.5 billion miles (2.4 billion kilometers), similar to that of Uranus in our own solar system — hints at a bottom-up formation mechanism.

The team directly imaged 29 Cygni b using JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), as part of a program that will image four exoplanets, all of which orbit their stars within around 9.3 billion miles (15 billion km) and have masses between one and 15 times that of Jupiter. The planets are all also relatively young and are still hot from their formation, with temperatures ranging from 990 to 1,830 degrees Fahrenheit (530 to 1,000 degrees Celsius), meaning they should all have similar atmospheric chemistry, too.

The researchers hunted for light being absorbed by carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, which allowed them to measure the proportions of elements heavier than helium, which astronomers call "metals," in 29 Cygni b's atmosphere.

This revealed that, not only is the exoplanet around 150 times richer in metals than Earth, but it is also much more metal-rich than its parent star. This indicates that, as it was forming, the gas giant gathered a wealth of metal-enriched clumps of material from its natal protoplanetary disk.

The team also determined that the orientation of 29 Cygni b's orbit is aligned with the rotation of its parent star, which indicates it did indeed form within a protoplanetary disk.

As the program continues to investigate similar planets, it will discover if other such worlds also greedily grabbed metal-rich matter during their formation. This could finally help scientists understand how the most massive planets in the Milky Way were born, be it like stars or like smaller planets.

The team's research was published on Tuesday (April 14) in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to study the star-forming region called W51, revealing "hidden" stars that were invisible to other telescopes.

The investigation has resulted in some absolutely stunning images that show the lanes of gas and dust illuminated by these young stars in unprecedented detail.

The team behind these observations was able to use the $10 billion space telescope to determine that the stars in W51 began to form within the last million years. If this makes these stellar infants sound ancient, consider that our middle-aged star, the sun, is around 4.6 billion years old.

This is far from the first time that astronomers have captured images of W51, but the JWST observations reveal these young stars like never before.

That is because these still-growing stellar infants are shrouded in natal blankets of gas and dust that readily block and absorb light, preventing most telescopes from seeing them. But infrared light is able to slip through these clouds, and that is the type of electromagnetic radiation that the JWST uses to observe the cosmos.

"With optical and ground-based infrared telescopes, we can't see through the dust to see the young stars," team member and University of Florida researcher Adam Ginsburg said in a statement accompanying the images. "Now we can."

Aside from their considerable aesthetic value, the images are of great scientific interest too. They could help researchers determine how massive stars like those that populate W51 form. The formation mechanism of high-mass stars is much less well understood than that of low-mass stellar bodies.

"Because of James Webb, we can see those hidden, young massive stars forming in this star-forming region," team member Taehwa Yoo of the University of Florida said. "By looking at them, we can study their formation mechanisms."

With the massive leap in quality of the JWST, the team was able to discover hitherto unseen structures in W51. This included shockwaves rippling out from infant stars, giant bubbles of gas, and dark filaments of dust.

"They are not the first photos of this region, but they are the best. They're so much better that they essentially are brand new photos," Ginsburg said. "Every time we look at these images, we learn something new and unexpected."

Stunning new views of Saturn offer the most detailed portrait yet of the ringed planet, showcasing the combined power of NASA's most advanced space telescopes.

Using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have created the most comprehensive look at Saturn to date, blending infrared, visible and ultraviolet light into a single, richly layered image, according to a statement from NASA.

"Together, scientists can effectively 'slice' through Saturn's atmosphere at multiple altitudes, like peeling back the layers of an onion," NASA officials said in the statement. "Each telescope tells a different part of Saturn's story, and the observations together help researchers understand how Saturn's atmosphere works as a connected three-dimensional system."

Each space telescope brings a distinct perspective. Hubble captures crisp, long-term visible-light views of Saturn's cloud bands and atmospheric changes, while the JWST peers deeper into the planet's atmosphere in infrared, revealing heat patterns and structures hidden beneath the upper cloud layers.

The Hubble data, captured in August 2024 as part of the long-running Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, was followed about 14 weeks later by Webb observations taken through Director's Discretionary Time, showing Saturn shifting from northern summer toward its 2025 equinox. Saturn's long seasonal cycles — each lasting about seven Earth years — also provide important context for interpreting changes in the planet's atmosphere and rings over time.

Together, the observations present Saturn as a layered and dynamic world. Hubble's visible-light view shows the planet's softly banded atmosphere, while Webb's infrared observations reveal additional structure, including deeper atmospheric layers, a meandering jet stream in the northern mid-latitudes, possible auroral activity, and several storms scattered across the southern hemisphere.

The combined data highlights how Saturn's appearance changes across different wavelengths, offering a more complete view of its atmosphere, according to the NASA statement.

The images also provide complementary views of Saturn's rings. In Hubble's data, the rings, made of water ice, appear bright in reflected sunlight, with clearly defined structure. In Webb's infrared view, the rings shine even more prominently, standing out against the darker background of space and revealing additional detail in the ring system.

Subtle differences between the telescopes' views also reveal ring features like spokes and structure in the thick central region, as well as differing perspectives of the outer ring, which appears thin and sharply defined in Webb's image but only faintly visible in Hubble's, according to the statement.

Seasonal context adds further value to the observations. Hubble's OPAL program has been tracking changes in the outer planets for more than a decade, providing a long-term record of Saturn's atmosphere. The new Webb observations build on that dataset, offering a broader, multiwavelength perspective as the planet continues its progression toward its next equinox.

The new dataset underscores the power of combining multiple observatories. By integrating Webb's infrared sensitivity with Hubble's long-standing visible-light record, scientists can construct a far more complete picture of planetary behavior than either telescope could achieve alone.

As both observatories continue their missions, researchers plan to build on these observations, tracking Saturn's evolving atmosphere, monitoring storm systems and refining models of its complex climate. With this new composite view, Saturn isn't just a distant gas giant — it's a dynamic world whose hidden layers are finally coming into focus.

An exoplanet so light that it would float on water, were there an ocean large enough, is continuing to frustrate astronomers by concealing its closest secrets with a layer of haze thicker than any ever seen on a planet before.

The haze is so thick that not even the vision of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can penetrate it, leaving the mystery of how this ultra-low density world and its sibling planets all formed unsolved for now.

"These ultra-low density planets are rare and they defy conventional understanding of how gas giants form," said Jessica Libby-Roberts of the University of Tampa in Florida in a statement. "And if explaining how one formed wasn't difficult enough, this system has three!"

Kepler-51d is a member of a four-planet system orbiting a young Sun-like star 2,615 light years away. They were discovered by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, which observed the planets transiting their star. From the amount of the star's light blocked during the transits, astronomers deduced the size of the worlds, and from transit timing variations — the way each planet's gravity pulls and pushes on the other planets, varying exactly when they are seen to transit — their masses were measured. Planets 51b, c and d have 7.1, 9 and 9.7 times the radius of Earth, respectively, making them about the same size as Saturn.

However, planets b, c and d have masses only 3.7, 5.6 and 5.6 times greater than Earth's, respectively. Saturn, on the other hand, has a mass 95 times more than Earth. So, these worlds are a similar size to Saturn, but much (much) less massive. (The fourth planet in the system, e, was only discovered in 2024 and its mass and radius are yet to be measured to any degree of accuracy.)

It is remarkable that the densities of planets 51b, c and d have more in common with cotton candy (or candy floss as we call it in the U.K.!) than with the planets we are more familiar with.

As such, Kepler-51d and its fellow ultra-low density worlds are completely alien to the planets in our own solar system. Take the gas giants Jupiter or Saturn, for example, which have large, dense and well-defined cores that on their own are ten times more massive than Earth. These cores formed first and then their gravitational pull attracted masses of gas from the planet-forming disk that encircled the Sun 4.5 billion years ago.

In contrast, the ultra-low density worlds of Kepler-51 "have tiny cores and huge atmospheres giving them a density akin to cotton candy," said Libby-Roberts. It is not clear how these small cores could have accreted relatively large amounts of gas.

So in search of answers, when Libby-Roberts was at Penn State University she led a team in 2020 to observe the Kepler-51 system spectroscopically using the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide-Field Camera 3. The purpose was to look for signs of the chemical composition of the atmosphere around the planets, which could provide clues as to how far from their star these worlds formed, and how they subsequently came to be so tenuous. Given their low density, they are undoubtedly rich in hydrogen and helium, the two lightest and most common elements in the universe, but the various trace gases present in their atmosphere could tell us more about their origin.

Yet Hubble found no sign of any chemistry, leading Libby-Roberts and her colleagues to suspect that there could be a featureless haze swamping the atmosphere of the planets.

Now, Libby-Roberts has returned to the Kepler-51 system, using the JWST's Near Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSpec) to try and probe harder into the atmosphere of Kepler-51d in the hope of detecting its chemical composition.

They aimed to accomplish this via transit spectroscopy. When Kepler-51d transits its star, some of its star's light filters through the planet's atmosphere. Any molecules present can absorb certain wavelengths of the star's light, which should show up in the star's spectrum as absorption lines.

"A star's light is filtered through the atmosphere of the planet before it reaches our telescopes," said Libby-Roberts. "If we look across a range of wavelengths, across a spectrum, we get a sort of fingerprint of the planet's atmosphere that reveals its composition."

Yet the spectrum still showed no signs of the chemistry of 51d's atmosphere, meaning that the haze that is present must be the thickest ever encountered on an exoplanet if even NIRSpec, operating at longer wavelengths than Hubble, cannot see through it.

"It seems very similar to the haze we see on Saturn's largest moon Titan, which has hydrocarbons like methane, but at a much larger scale," said co-researcher Suvrath Mahadevan at Penn State. "Kepler-51d seems to have a huge amount of haze, almost the radius of Earth."

There are currently no planet-formation models that can explain how such low density worlds can form, particularly so close to their star — if 51b, c and d were transported to our solar system they would all be packed into a region well inside the orbit of Venus.

"It's possible that [51d] formed further away and moved inward, but we are still left with a ton of questions about how this planet — and the other planets in this system — formed," said Libby-Roberts. "What is it about this system that created these three really oddball planets, a combination of extremes that we haven't seen anywhere else?"

It is possible that we are seeing these planets in a transitory phase. The system is half a billion years old, so young compared to our 4.5-billion-year-old solar system. Being young, the Kepler-51 star is still quite active and its stellar wind will be stripping away the outer gases of the ultra-low density planets. Perhaps if we came back in a billion years' time, much of each planets' gas will have been whittled away leaving behind a small core.

Some answers could still be forthcoming. A separate team is performing NIRSpec observations of Kepler-51b to try and find evidence of the composition of its atmosphere. They might instead find that it is also covered in haze, but if they are successful, then the clues those observations provide might also apply to 51c and d.

Then measurements of Kepler-51d are reported in the 16 March issue of The Astronomical Journal.

The James Webb Space Telescope has helped scientists determine that asteroid 2024 YR4, which previously had a 4.3% chance of crashing into our moon, will not impact our lunar companion at all. Instead, it will instead safely cruise past the moon at an altitude of 13,200 miles (21,200 kilometers).

When asteroid 2024 YR4 was discovered on Dec. 27, 2024 by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), it was for a short time the most dangerous asteroid ever discovered. With a diameter of about 197 feet (60 meters) there was originally a non-zero chance that it could impact Earth on Dec. 22, 2032. An asteroid of this size could destroy a city, or if it struck the ocean, produce a catastrophic tsunami that would endanger multiple coastal regions.

However, it was quickly found that 2024 YR4 would miss the Earth — but it remained unclear whether it'd hit the moon instead. Specifically, there was a 4.3% chance that it could strike the moon on Dec .22, 2032 instead. The uncertainty was the result of 2024 YR4's orbit around the sun not being known as precisely as needed in order to decide for sure whether it would hit the moon or miss it.

Astronomers thought they would have to wait until 2028 to get the next chance to observe 2024 YR4 and refine its orbit before getting some clear answers, but researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) realized that there would be a chance for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe 2024 YR4 between Feb. 18 and Feb. 26 this year.

During that week, the asteroid was moving against a faint field of stars whose positions have been precisely measured by the European Space Agency's Gaia mission. By tracking the object's motion against those stars, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was able to refine its orbit to high precision. It wasn't an easy measurement; the field of view of its Near-Infrared Camera is just 2.2 square arcminutes, and the asteroid is one of the faintest targets the JWST has ever observed.

The scientists at JHUAPL worked with the space telescope’s engineers, alongside the European Space Agency's Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre and NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, to aim the telescope precisely.

The new measurements mean that astronomers have now ruled out a collision with the moon. Instead, 2024 YR4 will pass 13,200 miles above the lunar surface — still a very close encounter, but posing no danger.

Had the impact happened on the near side of the moon, it would have provided scientists with their first up-close view of a large impact, and provided a stunning sight for observers on Earth, resulting in a brilliant flash and a new crater about 0.62 miles (1 kilometer) across. The energy imparted would have been equivalent to 6 million tons of TNT, or basically a large nuclear detonation. Ejecta thrown up by the impact would mostly have rained back down onto the surface of the moon, but millions of pounds of debris would have still escaped the lunar gravity and fallen towards Earth instead, possibly creating a unique meteor shower lasting a few days. The debris would also have been a hazard to satellites in orbit around the Earth, and, as some of the debris could linger in Earth orbital space for years, that hazard would have been long-lasting.

However, now that we know 2024 YR4 will miss its target, we'll just have to wait for the next asteroid to worry about, and remain ever vigilant for any that may threaten Earth.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured a truly spectacular view of the spiral galaxy NGC 5134, revealing glowing dust clouds, newborn stars and the ongoing cycle of stellar life and death.

Located about 65 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo, the galaxy may seem distant, but in cosmic terms, it's relatively close. This proximity allows the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to resolve remarkable details in the tightly wound spiral arms of the galaxy.

What is it?

NGC 5134 is a spiral galaxy, a type of galaxy characterized by a bright central core surrounded by sweeping arms filled with stars, gas and dust. These arms act as cosmic nurseries where new stars are constantly forming.

This dramatic image combines observations from two of the JWST's powerful instruments: the mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) and the near-infrared instrument (NIRCam). MIRI detects mid-infrared light emitted by warm dust, revealing strands and clumps of gas scattered throughout the galaxy. NIRCam captures shorter-wavelength infrared light that highlights the stars and star clusters embedded deep within the spiral arms.

Why is it amazing?

The glowing dust clouds visible throughout the galaxy are the raw material for new stars. As gravity pulls this gas together, new stars ignite — gradually using up all the galaxy's star-forming fuel. When stars die, they return some of that material back into space. Massive stars explode into supernovas, scattering elements across hundreds of light-years, while smaller stars like our sun shed their outer layers as they expand into red giants.

By studying galaxies like NGC 5134 in infrared light, astronomers can trace this ongoing cycle of stellar birth, evolution and recycling, helping scientists understand how galaxies grow and change over billions of years.

The James Webb Space Telescope's latest imagery is its most "cerebral" yet, capturing a dying star's nebula that looks uncannily like a brain inside a transparent skull.

Located about 5,000 light-years away in the constellation of Vela, the Sails, the nebula is officially called PMR 1. It is named after the astronomers who discovered it — Parker, Morgan and Russell — while conducting a survey with the 1.2-meter U.K. Schmidt Telescope at the Australian Astronomical Observatory in the late 1990s. When the Spitzer Space Telescope observed PMR 1 in infrared light in 2013, the nebula's appearance led to its unofficial nickname of the "Exposed Cranium Nebula."

Now the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has taken a new look at PMR-1 with both its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). Their unprecedented resolution reveals greater detail in the inner gases that form the "brain" and which are surrounded by a thinner shell of mostly hydrogen gas that forms the "cranium."

That outer shell is thought to have been expelled from the star at the center of the nebula first, and that shell has cooled down considerably compared to the complex mix of various ionized gases within the interior that were emitted later.

A curious split down the middle of the nebula looks like it is dividing the brain into left and right lobes. This split could have been blown by polar jets from the dying star. This hypothesis is supported in the MIRI image where the ionized gas can be seen spewing out through the hydrogen envelope at the top of the picture. If the split was produced by a jet, it gives some indication as to the orientation of the star relative to the nebula.

The big question though is the nature of the central, dying star. When it was discovered in the 1990s, the nebula's emission features looked like they belonged to a Wolf–Rayet star, which is one of the more extreme breeds of massive star. Wolf–Rayet stars are so unstable that they shed mass at a tremendous rate, blown away by a wind of radiation many times more powerful than the sun's solar wind. This expelled matter then forms a Wolf–Rayet nebula before the star itself eventually explodes as a supernova.

However, the presence of a Wolf–Rayet star inside PMR 1, or indeed inside its cousin PMR 2 that was discovered at the same time, has yet to be confirmed.

This leaves the door ajar for the possibility that the Exposed Cranium is actually just an ordinary planetary nebula produced by a less massive sun-like star that has expanded into its red giant phase and is now casting adrift its outer envelope to eventually leave behind its inert core in the form of a white dwarf.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array , astronomers have investigated 70 dusty, star-forming galaxies at the very edge of the universe. These galaxies, seen as they were less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang, could change everything we know about cosmic evolution.

It seems these galaxies were already rich in "metals," the term astronomers use to describe elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, despite existing before current models predict the current generation of stars could have forged and distributed those heavy elements.

"Dusty galaxies are massive galaxies with large amounts of metals and cosmic dust," team leader Jorge Zavala of the University of Massachusetts Amherst said in a statement. "And these galaxies are very old, which means stars were being formed in the early universe, earlier than our current models predict."

The research into these galaxies began when Zavala and colleagues used the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA), an array of 66 radio antennas located in the Atacama Desert region of northern Chile, to identify a population of 400 bright and dusty galaxies.

Further investigation with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) whittled these galaxies down to 70 faint dusty galaxy candidates on the very edge of the cosmos, the majority of which had never been seen before. Combining JWST and ALMA observations, the researchers then confirmed these galaxies had formed as long ago as 500 million years after the Big Bang.

That not only suggests that our story of cosmic history needs revision, but it also connects these galaxies to two other families of strange galaxies. These are extremely bright, star-birthing galaxies discovered in the early universe by the JWST and older galaxies that have "died" and are no longer forming stars.

"It's as if we now have snapshots of the lifecycle of these rare galaxies," Zavala said. "The ultrabright ones are young galaxies, the quiescent ones are in their old age, and the ones we found are young adults."

More research will be needed to link these three populations of galaxies. However, if they are connected, then it is clear that something is missing from our understanding of galactic evolution, and the development of stars must begin earlier in the cosmos than currently theorized.

The team's results were published on Tuesday (Feb. 17) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Scientists have long suspected that active supermassive black holes can kill their own host galaxies, but new research suggests these cosmic titans are more like serial killers that can extend their murderous rampage across many light-years and destroy neighboring galaxies, too.

For scientists, "death" for a galaxy means the curtailing of star formation. Supermassive black holes are known to cause this when they are actively feeding, as they heat their larder of gas and dust, provoking that matter content to emit powerful radiation. This radiation either pushes away gas, the building blocks of stars — thereby starving the galaxies and black holes themselves — or simply heats that gas and prevents it from cooling enough to collapse and birth a stellar body. Both outcomes can slow or even stop star formation.

"Traditionally, people have thought that because galaxies are so far apart, they evolve largely on their own," team leader Yongda Zhu of the University of Arizona said in a statement. "But we found that a very active, supermassive black hole in one galaxy can affect other galaxies across millions of light-years, suggesting that galaxy evolution may be more of a group effort."

Zhu and colleagues point out that this influence suggests the existence of a "galactic ecosystem" akin to the linked ecosystems of Earth in which changes in one region can deeply impact conditions in another.

"An active supermassive black hole is like a hungry predator dominating the ecosystem," he said. "Simply put, it swallows up matter and influences how stars in nearby galaxies grow."

There goes the neighborhood!

Though supermassive black holes with masses of millions or even billions of times that of the sun are thought to dwell at the hearts of all large galaxies, not all of these objects are cosmic killers. For instance, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) at the heart of the Milky Way may once have quenched star formation in our galaxy, but today it is quiet, existing on a diet equivalent to a human eating one grain of rice every million years.

Active supermassive black holes greedily feast on matter from a surrounding swirling cloud called an accretion disk. Their immense gravity generates tidal forces in this accretion disk that cause intense friction, resulting in high temperatures that cause this region to brightly glow across the electromagnetic spectrum. This turbulent region, an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN), can be seen from across the cosmos as a phenomenon known as a "quasar," often outshining the combined light of every star in its host galaxy.

Not all of the matter in an accretion disk is channeled to the black hole, however. Some matter is channeled to the poles of the supermassive black hole from where it is blasted out as parallel twin jets travelling at near light-speeds. These jets can stretch out far beyond the limits of the galaxy that hosts the active supermassive black hole.

It is little wonder, given the intense radiation of the accretion disk and the violent outflows represented by these twin jets, that active supermassive black holes have a powerful influence over the evolution of their host galaxies.

Since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began investigating the cosmos, a curious pattern has emerged regarding quasars. The more massive and powerful these active supermassive black holes are, the less they seem to be surrounded by neighboring galaxies. That's curious because large galaxies are usually found clustered together, not in isolation.

"We were puzzled," Zhu explained. "Was the expensive JWST broken?" he added with a laugh. "Then we realized the galaxies might actually be there, but difficult to detect because their very recent star formation was suppressed."

Zhu and colleagues began to suspect that bright quasars may not just be dampening star formation in their own galactic backyards; they may be disturbing the neighbors, too.

To investigate the possibility of active supermassive black holes killing star formation in neighboring galaxies, the team set about studying one of the brightest quasars ever seen, J0100+2802. This quasar existed when the universe was less than 1 billion years old, and its central engine is a supermassive black hole with around 12 billion times the mass of the sun.

Using the JWST, the scientists hunted for traces of ionized oxygen in the galaxies around J0100+2802, which is a sign of recent star formation. They found this tracer of star birth was much scarcer in galaxies within a million light-years of the powerful quasar than in galaxies outside that radius. That hints at squashed star formation in these proximate galaxies.

"Black holes are known to 'eat' a lot of stuff, but during the active eating process and in their luminous quasar form, they also emit very strong radiation. The intense heat and radiation split the molecular hydrogen that makes up vast, interstellar gas clouds, quenching its potential to accumulate and turn into new stars," Zhu said. "For the first time, we have evidence that this radiation impacts the universe on an intergalactic scale.

"Quasars don't just suppress stars in their host galaxies, but also in nearby galaxies within a radius of at least a million light-years."

The team now intends to look for this effect in other so-called quasar fields to develop a clearer picture of how supermassive black holes influence their cosmic neighborhoods.

"Understanding how galaxies influenced one another in the early universe helps us better understand how our own galaxy came to be," Zhu said. "Now we realize that supermassive black holes may have played a much larger role in galaxy evolution than we once thought — acting as cosmic predators, influencing the growth of stars in nearby galaxies during the early universe."

The team's results were published on Dec. 3, 2025 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

An international team of researchers has uncovered new insights into the upper atmosphere of Uranus, where ions swirling above the ice giant planet's clouds meet the magnetic field surrounding the world.

"Uranus's magnetosphere is one of the strangest in the solar system," Paola Tiranti, a researcher at Northumbria University in the U.K., said in a statement. "It's tilted and offset from the planet's rotation axis, which means its auroras sweep across the surface in complex ways."

Using the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument aboard the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the team studied Uranus as it rotated. The researchers observed how temperature and charged particles "vary with height across the planet," according to the statement; the resulting data could help scientists understand more about how energy behaves in ice giants' upper layers.

"By revealing Uranus's vertical structure in such detail, Webb is helping us understand the energy balance of the ice giants," Tiranti said. "This is a crucial step towards characterizing giant planets beyond our solar system."

The JWST continues to provide unprecedented detail on comic phenomena located millions, even billions, of miles away from us. With such detailed data available, scientists are still able to make new discoveries about the planets in our solar system. The telescope has previously had its sights set on Uranus too, even discovering a new moon of the planet in 2025.

"This is the first time we've been able to see Uranus's upper atmosphere in three dimensions," said Paola. "With Webb's sensitivity, we can trace how energy moves upward through the planet's atmosphere and even see the influence of its lopsided magnetic field."

Voyager 2 provided our first close-up data and images of Uranus way back in 1986. The flyby helped scientists figure out that Uranus is very cold compared to its neighboring planets — in fact, around then is when we found out Uranus is our solar system's coldest planet.

"Webb's data confirm that Uranus's upper atmosphere is still cooling, extending a trend that began in the early 1990s," said Paola. "The team measured an average temperature of around 426 kelvins (about 150 degrees Celsius), lower than values recorded by ground-based telescopes or previous spacecraft."

The research was published on Feb. 19 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have captured a stunning image of a "cosmic jellyfish." This aquatic-creature-like galaxy, designated COSMOS2020-635829, was seen as it existed 8.5 billion years ago, or around 5.3 billion years after the Big Bang. Astronomers say it could paint a more detailed picture of the evolution of galaxies at a crucial period in the adolescent universe.

COSMOS2020-635829 is an example of a jellyfish galaxy, a class of galaxies that get their moniker from the fact that they possess trailing tendrils of gas that resemble the flexible, stinging appendages of their oceanic namesakes. For jellyfish galaxies, these trails are created as they 'swim' through their galaxy cluster homes against the flow of strong winds that push on them, forcing out gas, a process called "ram-stripping."

The team discovered COSMOS2020-635829 while examining data collected by the JWST from a patch of sky over Earth called the Cosmic Evolution Survey Deep field, or the COSMOS field. This region is favored by astronomers for the study of distant and ancient galaxies because it lies away from the plane of the Milky Way and is clear of bright objects that would serve as obstructions.

"We were looking through a large amount of data from this well-studied region in the sky with the hopes of spotting jellyfish galaxies that haven’t been studied before," team member Ian Roberts of the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics in the Faculty of Science in the UK, said in a statement. "Early on in our search of the JWST data, we spotted a distant, undocumented jellyfish galaxy that sparked immediate interest."

The JWST image of COSMOS2020-635829 shows a galactic disk that appears relatively normal, not dissimilar from our own modern-day galaxy, barring the distinct gas trails. Bright blue "knots" can be seen in these tendrils that represent groupings of young stars. Similar features can be seen in the Hubble Space Telescope image of a similar jellyfish galaxy, seen above.

The youth of these stellar bodies implies that they were born outside the main galactic disk of COSMOS2020-635829 within these tendrils of ram-stripped gas. While this phenomenon is expected of jellyfish galaxies, the image of COSMOS2020-635829 has delivered at least one surprise. Previously, researchers had thought that still-forming galaxy clusters that existed 8.5 billion years or so ago would not commonly produce the pressure that leads to ram-stripping.

"The first is that cluster environments were already harsh enough to strip galaxies, and the second is that galaxy clusters may strongly alter galaxy properties earlier than expected," Roberts explained. "Another is that all the challenges listed might have played a part in building the large population of dead galaxies we see in galaxy clusters today. This data provides us with rare insight into how galaxies were transformed in the early universe."

The team now intends to continue studying COSMOS2020-635829 with the JWST, hoping to solve further mysteries regarding this and other jellyfish galaxies.

The team's results were published on Tuesday (Feb. 17) in The Astrophysical Journal.

Editor's Note (02/19/26): The article was updated to reflect the fact that the featured image was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope

Woven through the universe are forces, often unseen, that dictate its grand design. For example, at the very heart of nearly every galaxy, we find a supermassive black hole. This isn't just some cosmic void — it's a powerful engine.

Even in its quieter moments, this engine profoundly shapes its surroundings. We call black holes with this kind of behavior Low-Luminosity Active Galactic Nuclei, or LLAGN. Picture galactic engines, just idling. They're running, doing their thing, but at a much slower pace. Still, they influence entire galaxies. The quest for scientists? Deciphering the unique infrared language these galactic nuclei speak.

A new paper provides comprehensive emission line measurements from James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) nuclear spectra for seven LLAGN as well as the active galaxy Centaurus A. This research acts like a cosmic linguist, analyzing subtle spectral signatures to give us unprecedented insight into how these powerful, yet often hidden, forces influence star birth, sculpt galactic gas and orchestrate the evolution of galaxies.

To listen to these quiet galactic whispers, scientists need the right tools. The James Webb Space Telescope is perfectly suited.

JWST sees in the infrared, light with wavelengths longer than what our eyes see. This is absolutely crucial. Gas and dust swirling around a black hole block visible light, but infrared light can punch right through. When gas gets energized by the black hole, its atoms get excited. The atoms then settle back down, releasing light at very specific colors — what we call emission lines. These are like a fingerprint for the gas, telling us what it is made of, how hot it is, and even how fast it moves. This energy often comes from the ionizing continuum, a powerful, high-energy flashlight from the black hole that strips electrons from atoms. These are the critical clues astronomers collect, piecing together the story of what happens near these massive black holes.

The celestial language spoken by LLAGN offers significant insights into how these quiet giants operate. JWST observations reveal how these black holes, even with less power, eject material and energize gas, influencing star birth and galactic evolution. These are known as kinetic feedback processes.

The black hole also actively pushes and stirs the galactic gas and dust. It is not a passive bystander. This can clear out regions, stopping new stars from forming, or sometimes compress gas, triggering a burst of star formation. It's a complex dance these quiet engines perform regularly. A striking discovery is that these galaxies with LLAGN have unusually warm molecular hydrogen gas. Excitation temperatures are systematically higher than in other galaxies. This suggests that even an idling black hole can really heat its surroundings.

The team also measured the "full width at half maximum," or FWHM, of these emission lines. FWHM tells us how wide a light spike is. A wider spike means the gas moves around a lot, or it is very hot. These FWHM measurements provide crucial data on the chaotic motions and conditions within the gas, showing just how much activity there really is.

Understanding these cosmic architects helps us grasp how galaxies evolve. Historically, astronomers assumed the supermassive black holes in LLAGN were largely inert. Just kind of ... there. They thought the objects weren't much, their power having sunk to the background. But this work shows that even these quiet engines have a profound impact on their galactic homes. The fact that they can eject material, energize gas and create unusually warm molecular hydrogen means they are active players. They influence new star formation and dictate how galactic gas moves around.

These LLAGN influence the cosmos, even when they are not roaring at full power.

This research is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. It opens up new questions about how common this warm molecular hydrogen is. It also prompts scientists to consider what other subtle effects these quiet black holes might have. The universe holds many mysteries, and scientists, with instruments like JWST, are quickly learning to speak its many languages. The quest for understanding these architects of the cosmos, it continues. Always.

Our journey through the infrared whispers of LLAGN reveals a universe far more interconnected and dynamic than we often imagine. The supermassive black holes at the heart of galaxies, even when seemingly dormant, exert a powerful, quiet influence. This latest research, powered by the vision of JWST, provides detailed measurements that paint a clearer picture of their ionizing continuum and kinetic feedback processes.

We have learned these cosmic engines actively sculpt their surroundings, impacting star formation and galactic evolution. The discovery of unusually warm molecular hydrogen in these LLAGN is a testament to the unexpected complexity hiding in plain sight. It is a reminder that the universe always has more to teach us.

With every new emission line we decipher, we get a little closer to understanding the grand cosmic story. The work of scientists, using advanced tools, is made up of these small, significant steps. They are pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, one quiet whisper at a time. And we will keep listening, because there is a whole lot more to hear.

The study is currently viewable on the pre-print paper repository arXiv.

Astronomers may have just pushed the upper size limit of what counts as a planet, thanks to new insights into how giant worlds form.

New observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggest that even extremely massive gas giants — once thought too large to form like ordinary planets — may grow through the same basic process, shifting how scientists differentiate massive planets from brown dwarfs.

The findings come from a close look at the HR 8799 system, a young, sun-like star about 133 light-years from Earth that hosts four enormous gas giants orbiting far from their parent star. Each world is between five and ten times the mass of Jupiter — the largest planet in our own solar system — placing them near the fuzzy boundary between planets and brown dwarfs, which are substellar objects that fuse deuterium, rather than hydrogen like stars, earning them the nickname "failed stars," according to a statement from the University of California, San Diego.

For years, astronomers have debated whether planets this massive could form through core accretion, the slow, bottom-up process in which solid material clumps together into a dense core that then pulls in vast amounts of gas. At extreme orbital distances, where material is sparse and protoplanetary disks fade quickly, many researchers thought this mechanism simply wouldn't allow enough time for these planets to grow so large.

To test that assumption, the research team used the JWST's powerful infrared spectrographs to analyze the chemical makeup of the planets' atmospheres. Instead of focusing on common gases like water vapor or carbon monoxide, the scientists searched for sulfur-bearing molecules — elements that typically begin as solid grains in a young protoplanetary disk and thus suggest the planet formed through core accretion, according to the statement.

The spectral data provided by the JWST revealed hydrogen sulfide in the atmosphere of HR 8799 c, one of the system's inner giants, providing strong evidence that the planet formed by first assembling a solid core before rapidly accreting gas. That chemical fingerprint is otherwise difficult to explain if the planet instead formed through a rapid, star-like collapse of gas. The team also found that the planets were more enriched in heavy elements, like carbon and oxygen, than their star, further supporting that they formed as planets.

"With the detection of sulfur, we are able to infer that the HR 8799 planets likely formed in a similar way to Jupiter despite being five to ten times more massive, which was unexpected," Jean-Baptiste Ruffio, lead author of the study, said in the statement.

Therefore, the study suggests that core accretion can operate efficiently even at extreme masses and distances, expanding the known limits of the planet-building process. If confirmed in other systems, the finding could force astronomers to rethink where — and how — the line between giant planets and brown dwarfs is drawn.

Their findings were published Feb. 9 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered a wealth of molecules that could serve as the initial building blocks of life in a bright, relatively close galaxy. The discovery could deepen our understanding of how complex carbon-based molecules form in some of the most extreme regions of the galaxy.

The team behind this research used the JWST's Near InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) instruments to investigate IRAS 07251–0248, an ultra-luminous infrared galaxy whose dense galactic heart is obscured by immense amounts of dust and gas. This material absorbs many wavelengths of light, except infrared. And as the JWST studies the cosmos in infrared, that makes it the ideal instrument to dive into the heart of IRAS 07251–0248  — and what it discovered there surprised astronomers.

"We found an unexpected chemical complexity, with abundances far higher than predicted by current theoretical models," team leader Ismael García Bernete, a researcher at the Center for Astrobiology (CAB), said in a statement. "This indicates that there must be a continuous source of carbon in these galactic nuclei fuelling this rich chemical network."

Using data from MIRI and NIRSpec, the team was able to characterize the abundance and temperature of chemicals in gas, dust, and ices in IRAS 07251–0248, discovering a staggeringly rich inventory of small organic molecules, including benzene, methane, acetylene, diacetylene, triacetylene, and the highly reactive methyl radical, which has never been detected beyond the Milky Way before. The investigation also revealed solids, including grains of carbon-based material and water ice.

These molecules could serve as the building blocks of more complex organic molecules, which are vital in the development and sustaining of life.

"Although small organic molecules are not found in living cells, they could play a vital role in prebiotic chemistry, representing an important step towards the formation of amino acids and nucleotides," team member Dimitra Rigopoulou of the University of Oxford said.

The chemistry seen by Rigopoulou and colleagues can't be explained by extreme temperatures and the turbulent stirring of gas alone, leading the team to suggest that bombardment by high-energy particles called "cosmic rays" may have fragmented larger molecules like carbon-rich grains of dust. This would have released small organic molecules.

The findings suggest that the heavily obscured galactic nuclei of galaxies like IRAS 07251–0248 could act as a production line for organic molecules, thus chemically enhancing their home systems.

The team's results, published on Friday (Feb. 6) in the journal Nature, could therefore lay down a roadmap to further investigate the formation and evolution of space-based organic molecules, also revealing the power of the JWST to study regions of space hitherto hidden from our gaze.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have built a detailed map of dark matter, showing the density of this mysterious stuff across a field of view that encompasses around 800,000 galaxies.

Dark matter is so puzzling to scientists because it doesn't interact with electromagnetic radiation, or simply light,, and is thus effectively invisible to us. This tells researchers that dark matter isn't just difficult-to-see ordinary matter made up of protons, neutrons and electrons, which are particles that do interact with light. Hence, the search for particles that could comprise dark matter has been a complicated one. To make matters even more complex, these particles appear to outweigh particles that comprise ordinary matter in the cosmos by a ratio of five to one.

Fortunately, dark matter does interact with gravity, therefore influencing the very fabric of space and time. And the curvature of space caused by large concentrations of dark matter — like dark matter haloes that envelope galaxies and galactic clusters — can influence the passage of light in a process called gravitational lensing first predicted by Albert Einstein back in 1915. It is through its gravitational influence that astronomers were able to use the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to build this new map of dark matter.

The area of the sky analyzed with this investigation is around 2.5 times the size of the full moon (as seen from our vantage point on Earth) and located in the constellation of Sextans. The JWST studied this region for around 255 hours with its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument as part of the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS).

COSMOS is conducted by around 15 different telescopes, including the JWST's trusty sibling the Hubble Space Telescope. These eyes on the universe all repeatedly study a larger section of the sky equivalent to around 10 full moons. This repetition with instruments that see the cosmos in different ways allows scientists to investigate how galaxies grow, with Hubble and JWST data helping to unravel the role dark matter plays in things like galactic evolution.Additionally, Hubble observed the same region involved in the new study back in 2007, and the section has since been investigated by many other ground-based telescopes independently. But the immense sensitivity of the JWST has helped scientists produce a map with around 10 times more galaxies than those produced by ground telescopes and twice as many as seen in the Hubble map.

Using these JWST observations, the team inferred the distribution of dark matter using "weak gravitational lensing" in particular, which is the subtle distortion of light from thousands of background galaxies caused as it passes warped space caused by concentrations of dark matter.

Additionally, observing the region with the JWST's other main instrument, Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), allowed the researchers to better measure the distances to the galaxies in this section of the sky.

The new dark matter map is just another example of how the JWST is revolutionizing our view of space, both near and far, while redefining our understanding of familiar bodies as well as the most mysterious aspects of the cosmos.

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted the most distant galaxy yet detected, NASA announced Wednesday (Jan. 28), allowing astronomers to peer closer than ever before to the era when the first stars and galaxies formed, known as cosmic dawn.

The galaxy, named MoM-z14, offers a rare glimpse into the universe just 280 million years after the Big Bang. Its light has traveled for about 13.5 billion years to reach Earth, making it the farthest and one of the earliest known galaxies ever observed.

"With Webb, we are able to see farther than humans ever have before, and it looks nothing like what we predicted, which is both challenging and exciting," study lead author Rohan Naidu at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research said in a statement.

The discovery, based on JWST data from April 2025 and published this month in the Open Journal of Astrophysics, adds MoM-z14 to a growing list of unexpectedly luminous young galaxies that challenge existing theories about how quickly stars and galaxies formed after the universe began. According to NASA, MoM-z14 is "brighter, more compact, and more chemically enriched" than astronomers anticipated for such an early era.

Among its most surprising features are elevated levels of nitrogen, which suggest that massive stars may have formed and evolved more rapidly in the dense early universe than current models predict. The galaxy also appears to have cleared its surrounding region of primordial hydrogen gas — an unexpected finding, the researchers say, given that the early universe was filled with neutral hydrogen.

"There is a growing chasm between theory and observation related to the early universe, which presents compelling questions to be explored going forward," study co-author Xuejian (Jacob) Shen, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, said in the statement.

Before JWST's launch, theoretical models suggested that detecting bright galaxies beyond a redshift of 10, past the reach of the Hubble Space Telescope, would be extraordinarily difficult. Those models assumed early galaxies would be small, faint, and rare, leading astronomers to expect only a handful of dim sources that would require tens of hours of spectroscopic observations to confirm, the new study notes.

Instead, JWST has routinely exceeded expectations, its powerful infrared eye capturing light from tens of young galaxies that existed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

"While we were hoping for some very early objects, I don't think any of us expected to break the redshift record!" study co-author Pieter van Dokkum, a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University, told Space.com in May last year, when a preprint version of the paper was released.

That the telescope continues to break its own records suggests that even more record-breaking discoveries lie ahead, astronomers say.

"It's an incredibly exciting time," study co-author Yijia Li of the Pennsylvania State University said in the NASA statement, "with Webb revealing the early universe like never before and showing us how much there still is to discover."

Using the James Webb Space Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray space telescope, scientists have observed the most distant and thus earliest galaxy cluster ever seen coming together. The infant cluster, or protocluster, was assembling itself just 1 billion years after the Big Bang, far earlier in the history of the cosmos than previously thought possible.

Light from this protocluster, designated JADES-ID1, has been travelling to Earth for 12.7 billion years, meaning it is seen undergoing an early, violent phase of formation between 1 billion and 2 billion years earlier than expected. This discovery represents a new mystery for scientists to investigate: How did galaxy clusters, the largest gravitationally bound structures in the cosmos, grow so quickly?

"This may be the most distant confirmed protocluster ever seen," team leader Akos Bogdan of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) said in a statement. "JADES-ID1 is giving us new evidence that the universe was in a huge hurry to grow up."

An expanding problem

Galaxy clusters are composed of thousands of galaxies, vast clouds of hot gas, and a huge framework of dark matter, the effectively invisible "stuff" around which galaxies and clusters gather and grow. Not only can such clusters be used to determine the dark matter content of the universe, but they can also help astronomers better calculate the rate at which the universe expands.

"It's very important to actually see when and how galaxy clusters grow," team member Gerrit Schellenberger, also of CfA, said in the statement. "It's like watching an assembly line make a car, rather than just trying to figure out how a car works by looking at the finished product."

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)/Chandra observations revealed JADES-ID1 as a protocluster thanks to two main properties: many galaxies bound by gravity, as seen by the JWST, and a huge surrounding cloud of hot gas seen via their X-ray emissions by Chandra. This gas is falling into the protocluster, and as it does, it is intensely heated, generating X-rays.

Thus far, models of galaxy cluster formation have predicted that the density of galaxies seen in JADES-ID1 wouldn't be possible to reach just 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The previous earliest protocluster seen by astronomers existed around 3 billion years after the universe's origin.

In the billions of years that followed the period during which the JWST and Chandra observed JADES-ID1, this protocluster would have gone on to form a galaxy cluster similar to those seen in the local universe.

"We thought we'd find a protocluster like this two or three billion years after the Big Bang — not just one billion," team member Qiong Li from the University of Manchester, UK, said. "Before, astronomers found surprisingly large galaxies and black holes not long after the Big Bang, and now we're finding that clusters of galaxies can also grow rapidly."

The team's results were published on Wednesday (Jan. 28) in the journal Nature.

Black holes may be invisible, but their influence shapes galaxies, modern technology and humanity's understanding of its own limits.

That was the message shared last week by Priyamvada Natarajan, a theoretical astrophysicist at Yale University, during a session at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Natarajan, whose research focuses on cosmology, gravitational lensing and black hole physics, traced how decades of theoretical work on black holes have transformed scientists' understanding of the universe and quietly underpin everyday technologies.

"Black holes have a very intimate relationship with each and every one of you," she told attendees. "You got here to Davos because the same equations that govern and explain black holes actually guide GPS."

Those equations come from Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes how mass and energy curve space and time. While black holes represent the theory's most extreme manifestation, the same mathematics is essential for calculating the subtle but measurable time differences experienced by satellites orbiting Earth.

Clocks aboard GPS satellites tick slightly faster than clocks on the ground because they are farther from Earth's gravitational pull. Without correcting for these relativistic effects, navigation errors would quickly accumulate, rendering GPS unreliable.

For much of the 20th century, however, black holes were regarded largely as mathematical curiosities — solutions to Einstein's equations with no clear observational evidence. That began to change in the 1960s, when astronomers identified Cygnus X-1, a powerful X-ray source that became the first widely accepted black hole candidate.

Astronomers now know that most large galaxies, including the Milky Way, host central supermassive black holes whose masses are closely linked to the properties of their host galaxies.

This revised picture, however, has introduced a new puzzle. Telescope observations show that supermassive black holes formed remarkably early in cosmic history, when the universe was only a few hundred million years old. Their sheer size and rapid growth challenge conventional models, which predict that the behemoths grow gradually from the remnants of collapsed, sun-like stars that slowly devour surrounding matter. The origin story of early supermassive black holes therefore remains one of astrophysics' most persistent questions.

Natarajan and her colleagues proposed a pathway for the universe's first black holes to form without requiring stars. The team suggested that under specific primordial conditions, pristine gas clouds — which would typically fragment and form stars — instead collapsed wholesale into massive black holes. These objects, known as direct-collapse black holes, would have contained tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the sun within a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Starting from such unusually large "seeds" helps resolve the timing problem posed by the existence of billion-solar-mass black holes less than a billion years after the universe formed.

Such a system, Natarajan said, would be an "overmassive black hole galaxy whose light is dominated not by the stars but by a black hole that is growing in its center."

Her team predicted more than a decade ago that these early black holes would leave distinctive observational signatures detectable by future observatories, including the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. In recent years, those predictions have begun to bear out.

One striking example is UHZ1, which reveals that accreting supermassive black holes were already in place just 470 million years after the Big Bang, with masses roughly 10 million times that of the sun.

Another is the so-called Infinity Galaxy, where JWST observations revealed two compact galactic nuclei surrounded by ring-like structures that likely formed via a head-on collision between two disk galaxies. Embedded between them lies a supermassive black hole, not at the center of either galaxy but suspended in a vast reservoir of gas, suggesting it formed through the direct collapse of dense, turbulent gas triggered by the collision.

"It's a thrill," said Natarajan, "to be around and, within one career lifetime, to have had the fortune of making predictions that were testable, have been tested, and have been validated."

Beyond their scientific impact, black holes also carry philosophical weight, she added.

"Studying cosmology in general and black holes specifically really instills a sense of cosmic humility," Natarajan said.

"Looking out into the universe," she added, "is uniquely allowing us to look back in time and piece together this beautiful cosmic story that we are part of."

Little Red Dots, mysterious objects discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), could be nurseries for massive black holes that didn't form from collapsing stars, but instead emerged directly from vast gas clouds.

If this is the case, then it could solve not only the puzzle of the nature of Little Red Dots, but also another mystery uncovered by the JWST since it began operations in 2022. That is the discovery of a large population of supermassive black holes as early as 500 million years after the Big Bang.

This is problematic because the merger-driven process, thought to give rise to supermassive black holes with masses millions of even billions of times that of the sun, had previously been theorized to take at least a billion years to forge these cosmic titans that sit at the heart of large galaxies

That problem could be solved if supermassive black hole mergers begin with a "heavy seed", a direct collapse black hole, created when vastly overdense regions within primordial gas clouds collapse. This contrasts with a "light seed", formed when stars reach the end of their lives and explode as supernovae, leaving behind stellar-mass black holes

Not only would heavy seeds remove mass restrictions on the black holes that begin this merger process, but they would also allow it to get underway before the first generation of massive stars had even lived and died.

"All galaxies likely harbor a supermassive black hole at their centre, whose origin represents one of the frontier mysteries of modern astrophysics. One theoretical pathway to the formation of the heaviest black holes is that of direct collapse," research team leader Elia Cenci of the University of Geneva told Space.com. "In this scenario, black holes form following the collapse of a short-lived supermassive star that in turn forms from pristine gas that collapses at the centre of dark matter haloes that satisfy a number of stringent criteria. These criteria are mostly concerned with avoiding the formation of molecular hydrogen, which can efficiently cool the gas at high redshift, favoring the formation of smaller stars."

Cenci explained that Little Red Dots are weird sources of light that mostly emerged when the universe was less than a billion years old. Discovered through deep extragalactic surveys carried out with the JWST, they appear red and exceptionally compact, hence their name.

Little Red Dots are unusual for a number of other reasons, from the pattern of the light they emit, their spectra, to their physical properties, and the fact that they disappear early in the history of the 13.8 billion-year-old universe.

"A popular explanation for these objects is that we are looking at an abundant population of faint massive black holes of the early universe surrounded by very dense gas and stars that we would not been able to discover with previous instrumentation," Cenci said.

Cenci and colleagues connected Little Red Dots and direct collapse black holes while running high-resolution simulations of cosmic evolution in the early universe.

"Our results show that direct-collapse black holes that are newly formed naturally match the overall abundance and key physical characteristics inferred for the enigmatic Little Red Dots discovered with the JWST," Cenci said. "It is exciting to think that, if future studies confirm our proposed connection with direct-collapse black holes, Little Red Dots may represent the first direct observational evidence of the birth of the most massive black holes in the universe.

"For the first time, we would have real laboratories to understand the conditions under which giant black holes have formed."

Supermassive black holes could get a head start in Little Red Dots

Cenci explained that the advantage of direct collapse black holes is that they can act as so-called heavy seeds for black hole formation. This means that they can already be tens of thousands to a million times the mass of the sun when they form, unlike black holes formed via the death of stars, the mass of which is limited by the mass of the progenitor stars.

That provides a significant head start in growing supermassive black holes.

"Compared to lighter black hole seeds, they can grow more easily to the giant black holes that we observe in the short time available since the Big Bang, in astronomical terms at least," Cenci said.

The University of Geneva researcher also explained why direct collapse black holes and their nurseries aren't found in the local, modern-day universe, saying that the conditions needed include a lack of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Elements that are forged by stars and seeded in galaxies are released when these stars reach the end of their lives and explode as supernovae.

"In order to form direct collapse black holes, the gas should not form stars on its way to collapse in a monolithic fashion. Therefore, their 'nursery' environment must be pristine, not forming heavier molecules nor being polluted by the heavy elements produced by stellar evolution," Cenci said. "Practically speaking, these conditions are only possible in the early universe."

One of the most curious aspects of Little Red Dots is that they appear to vanish from the universe around 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang — or, as astronomers like Cenci describe it, at around redshift z~6. She believes this disappearance can be explained if Little Red Dots are hubs for direct collapse black hole formation.

"After z~6, the non-linear interplay of processes such as stellar evolution and feedback will make haloes hostile environments for the formation of direct collapse black holes, being more polluted with heavy elements and experiencing less intense inflows of gas that would favour the monolithic collapse scenario," Cenci said. "The decline in the population of newborn direct collapse black holes after z~6 is a natural consequence of the criteria determining where these objects can form."

Observational evidence confirming Little Red Dots as direct collapse black hole nurseries will require higher-resolution astronomical data and a more complete spectral coverage, Cenci explained. This would put additional constraints on the importance of the role black holes and stars play in Little Red Dots, as well as confirming the dynamics and physical state of their dense gas reservoirs. Until then, she and her team will continue to simulate conditions in the early universe to better understand this potential relationship.

"We are running a large suite of high-resolution simulations to test the implications of a number of different formation conditions for direct collapse black holes," "Our work will focus on understanding and characterising the population of direct collapse black holes in a cosmological context, and we will definitely be able to provide further insights on to what extent we can relate direct collapse black holes and Little Red Dots.

The team's research was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

For the first time, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has seen a young star forge crystals in blazing heat and hurl them to the icy outskirts of its planet-forming disk, which could help explain the evolution of comets at the edge of our solar system.

The protostar, called EC 53, lies about 1,300 light-years from Earth and is surrounded by a disk of gas and dust where planets and other bodies are taking shape. Using the Mid-Infrared Instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers mapped where crystalline silicates form and how they travel outward.

Webb pinpointed the inner disk — roughly where Earth and the inner planets would have formed in our solar system — as the birthplace of these crystals. Powerful winds from the star's disk act like a cosmic conveyor belt, propelling the crystals into the frigid outer disk, where comets may eventually form, according to a statement from NASA.

"EC 53's layered outflows may lift up these newly formed crystalline silicates and transfer them outward, like they're on a cosmic highway," Jeong‑Eun Lee, lead author of a new study reporting the results, said in the statement. "Webb not only showed us exactly which types of silicates are in the dust near the star, but also where they are both before and during a burst."

EC 53 experiences bursts roughly every 18 months, rapidly accreting material and sending some back into space as jets and winds. It's during these energetic 100-day-long episodes that the star forges silicate crystals — minerals that should only form in hot environments — and catapults them outward, seeding the outer disk with the ingredients that icy comets carry today.

Astronomers have long detected crystalline silicates in comets and other stars' disks, but the connection between their fiery origins and cold resting places was unclear — until now. Webb's detailed spectra and spatial mapping provide the first direct evidence linking formation and transport.

"We've effectively shown how the star creates and distributes these superfine particles, which are each significantly smaller than a grain of sand," Joel Green, co-author of the study, said in the statement.

The study highlights just how dynamic young planetary systems are and how stars actively reshape their surroundings. Observing protoplanetary disks like EC 53 can offer new insights on the building blocks of planets and comets scattered across space.

Their findings were published Jan. 21 in the journal Nature.

A tremendously large cloud that blocked the light from a distant star has been found to consist of swirling winds of vaporized metal. Even more curious, the cloud appears to be strangely bound to a mystery body that could be a massive planet or a low-mass star.

Astronomers were first tipped off to the existence of this metallic cloud in September 2024 when a sun-like star, designated J0705+0612 and located around 3,000 light-years away, became 40 times dimmer than usual. This dimming lasted for nine months, before the star returned to its original brightness in May 2025.

That dramatic darkening captured the interest of Johns Hopkins astronomer Nadia Zakamska, as astronomers don't typically witness such events. "Stars like the sun don’t just stop shining for no reason, so dramatic dimming events like this are very rare," Zakamska said in a statement.

Zakamska and colleagues followed up on this event using the Gemini South telescope, located on Cerro Pachón in Chile, the Apache Point Observatory 3.5-meter telescope, and the 6.5-meter Magellan Telescopes. They combined these fresh observations of J0705+0612 with archival data, finding that the star had been temporarily covered, or occulted, by a vast, slow-moving cloud of gas and dust.

The team estimated that this cloud is around 120 million miles (200 million kilometers) wide, or around 15,000 times as wide as the diameter of Earth. It is estimated to have been around 1.2 billion miles (2 billion km) away from J0705+0612 when it caused the dimming of the star. That is around 13 times the distance between Earth and the sun.

Low-mass star or high-mass planet?

The researchers also discovered that this cloud is gravitationally bound to another object, one that also orbits the star J0705+0612. That body must be massive enough to exert a strong enough gravitational influence to hold the cloud together, implying it has at least several times the mass of Jupiter, though it could be much more massive than this. That means, the big question is: what is the nature of this mystery object?

If the object is a star, then this cloud is a circumsecondary disk, a cloud of gas and dust that orbits the less massive star in a binary system. If the unknown body is a planet, then the cloud is a circumplanetary disk. The observation of a cloud of either type occulting a star is extremely rare.

To determine the composition of this cloud, the researchers turned to Gemini South's Gemini High-resolution Optical SpecTrograph (GHOST), watching for two hours as the cloud sat in front of J0705+0612.

"When I started observing the occultation with spectroscopy, I was hoping to unveil something about the chemical composition of the cloud, as no such measurements had been done before," Zakamska said. "But the result exceeded all my expectations."

The team discovered that the cloud was rich in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which astronomers somewhat confusingly refer to as "metals." These winds of gaseous metals, including iron and calcium, were mapped in three-dimensions, marking the first time astronomers have measured the internal gas motions of a disk orbiting a secondary object such as a planet or low-mass star.

"The sensitivity of GHOST allowed us to not only detect the gas in this cloud, but to actually measure how it is moving," Zakamska said. "That's something we’ve never been able to do before in a system like this."

Mapping the speed and direction of winds within the cloud revealed to the team that it is moving separately from its host star, further confirming that it is bound to a secondary object sitting in the outer limits of this planetary system.

The team suggests that this cloud may have been created when two planets orbiting J0705+0612 slammed into each other, spraying out dust, rocks, and other debris. This kind of event is common in chaotic and young planetary systems, but is unusual for a system like this one, which is estimated to be around 2 billion years old.

"This event shows us that even in mature planetary systems, dramatic, large-scale collisions can still occur," Zakamska said. "It's a vivid reminder that the universe is far from static — it’s an ongoing story of creation, destruction, and transformation."

The team's research was published on Wednesday (Jan. 21) in the journal The Astronomical Journal.

Scientists may have solved a cosmic mystery that has been troubling them since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began observations back in 2022.

When astronomers started looking back into the early days of the universe with the cutting-edge observatory, they discovered supermassive black holes that appear to have formed prior to the universe being 1 billion years old, something our current models of the cosmos can't explain But a new study has found that a black hole "feeding frenzy" may explain how these cosmic monsters were born so early in the universe's history.

"We found that the chaotic conditions that existed in the early universe triggered early, smaller black holes to grow into the super-massive black holes we see later, following a feeding frenzy which devoured material all around them," research leader Daxal Mehta of Maynooth University said in a statement. "We revealed, using state-of-the-art computer simulations, that the first generation of black holes – those born just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang grew incredibly fast, into tens of thousands of times the size of our sun."

Performing complex computer simulations, this team of researchers found that the turbulent and dense-gas-rich conditions in the first galaxies may have allowed black holes to enter into brief phases of mega-gluttony, exceeding a barrier known as the "Eddington limit." This limit determines how much material can fall to a body like a star or black hole before the radiation generated by that accretion pushes further matter away, emptying the central object's larder of gas and dust, thus cutting off its food supply.

Periods of super-consumption that defy this limit are known as "super-Eddington accretion" and serve as the missing link between black holes that form when massive stars die in supernova explosions and monstrous supermassive black holes.

Supermassive black holes are like six-foot toddlers

Supermassive black holes with masses millions or even billions of times that of the sun sit at the heart of all large galaxies in the modern 13.8 billion-year-old universe, which isn't troubling to explain at all, as they have had plenty of time to grow.

The issue is the discovery of supermassive black holes as early as 500 million years after the Big Bang, a population that the JWST has routinely been uncovering for the last three and a half years. That is because the merger and feeding processes that are thought to allow black holes to achieve supermassive status are thought to take at least 1 billion years.

"It's like seeing a family walking down the street, and they have two six-foot teenagers, but they also have with them a six-foot-tall toddler," research team member and Maynooth University scientist John Regan previously told Space.com. "That's a bit of a problem. How did the toddler get so tall? And it's the same for supermassive black holes in the universe. How did they get so massive so quickly?"

The team's simulations suggest that a super-Eddington feeding frenzy could have allowed the first generation of black holes to gorge on the dense gas of the early cosmos to reach masses of tens of thousands of times that of the sun. While that doesn't get us to supermassive black holes, it provides a significant head start on the merger process that would see black holes of increasing size collide and fuse together to birth an even more massive black hole.

"These tiny black holes were previously thought to be too small to grow into the behemoth black holes observed at the center of early galaxies," Mehta said. "What we have shown here is that these early black holes, while small, are capable of growing spectacularly fast, given the right conditions."

The team's research could help scientists determine whether early supermassive black holes started out as "light seeds," with ten to a few hundred times the mass of our sun, or as "heavy seeds," with as much as 100,000 times the mass of the sun. Previously, it had been theorized that only heavy seeds would be massive enough to facilitate the rapid growth of supermassive black holes.

"Now we're not so sure," Regan said. "Heavy seeds are somewhat more exotic and may need rare conditions to form. Our simulations show that your 'garden variety' stellar mass black holes can grow at extreme rates in the early universe."

The team's research doesn't just suggest a new avenue for supermassive black hole growth, but it also shows how important high-resolution simulations are in our investigation of the early cosmos.

"The early universe is much more chaotic and turbulent than we expected, with a much larger population of massive black holes than we anticipated, too," Regan said.

As for collecting evidence of this theory, that may be a job not for the JWST or any other traditional astronomical device, but for instruments designed to detect the tiny ripples in space known as gravitational waves that mergers such as this radiate. Of particular importance could be the first space-based gravitational wave detector, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a joint European Space Agency/ NASA mission set to launch in 2035.

"Future gravitational wave observations from that mission may be able to detect the mergers of these tiny, early, rapidly growing baby black holes," Regan concluded.

The team's research was published on Wednesday (Jan. 21) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Astronomers have discovered what kind of stellar body is left after two stars collide and merge to generate an explosion called a "luminous red nova." Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the scientists discovered that the result of this merger event, which triggers a bright burst of light, is a supermassive star similar to a red supergiant star, and also found that these stellar mergers could have provided the raw materials needed for life.

Though many astronomical events occur over cosmic timescales of thousands or even millions of years, transient events like supernova explosions, the merger of black holes, and the collision and fusion of stars, as in the case of luminous red novas, occur over much shorter periods, from fractions of a second to decades. That gives astronomers the opportunity to study these events in "real time" as they develop.

"We don't normally witness the evolution of a system over millions of years, but these pairs of stars are experiencing the final moments before their collision, which instead occurs much more rapidly," research team leader Andrea Reguitti of the Istituto Nazionale Di Astrofisica (INAF) said in a statement. "The resulting transient, in fact, has evolutionary times comparable to those of a supernova — that is, a few months."

Reguitti set about answering the question of what remains after the luminous red nova fades away and the two stars have merged into a single object by studying nine different luminous red novas found in archival data. These transients have brightnesses in between that of classical novas, triggered when a white dwarf hoards material from a companion star thus sparking a runaway nuclear explosion, and supernovas that mark the death of a massive star and the birth of a black hole or a neutron star. The masses of stars involved in the mergers that trigger the formation of a luminous red nova can range from less than that of the sun to up to 50 times that of our star.

Of the nine luminous red novas examined, the team found that only two told the entire story of these powerful merger events. These were AT 2011kp, which was spotted in 2011 in a galaxy located around 25 million light-years away, and AT 1997bs, which erupted in a galaxy located 31 million light-years from Earth.

"In some cases, analyzing archival images from major space telescopes taken years before the event has allowed us to identify the progenitor, that is, study the system as it was before the merger, and therefore understand what types of stars were involved," Reguitti said. "However, until now, it was unknown what type of star would remain after the merger."

To determine the nature of the stellar body left behind by these merger events, the team had to observe them several years after the initial event. That is because when stars merge to create a luminous red nova, they eject a vast amount of stellar material. That gives rise to the brightest phase of these transients (changes in brightness), but the bright and dense shell of matter also obscures the view of the created stellar body. As every luminous red nova can eject dust equivalent to 300 times the mass of Earth, it is easy to see how the initial stages of these events would be difficult to observe through all of that material.

This investigation also required a space telescope powerful enough to observe distant galaxies and distinguish individual stars. That is where the JWST came in. Using infrared data gathered by the JWST in 2023 and 2024, in addition to visible light images collected by Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope, the team took another look at their selected luminous red novas, observing AT 2011kp as it was 12 years after the stellar merger event took place, while AT 1997bs was seen as it was after 27 years of evolution.

This revealed a stellar object very similar to a red supergiant star, a body hundreds of times the size of the sun, which, if placed at the heart of our solar system, would engulf the rocky inner planets and graze the orbit of Jupiter. Despite their immense size, the created stars were much cooler than the sun, with surface temperatures of between 5,840 degrees Fahrenheit and 6,740 degrees Fahrenheit (3,200 and 3,700 degrees Celsius) compared to the sun's surface temperature of around 10,300 degrees Fahrenheit (5,700 degrees Celsius).

"We didn't expect to find this type of object as a result of the merger," team member Andrea Pastorello, also of the INAF, said. "Rather, we would have expected that the system, going from two stars of a certain mass to a single one with a mass almost equal to the sum of the two (net of the material expelled by the collision), would have stabilized on a hotter and more compact source."

The impressive observing power of the JWST also allowed the researchers to study the chemicals that comprise the dust surrounding this newborn superstar. They found that this dust was made up of mostly carbon compounds like graphite. These compounds are important building blocks for living things, and with luminous red novas making such a significant contribution to interstellar dust, these events could have also played a key role in supplying the raw materials needed for life on Earth.

"We are made of carbon compounds, the same carbon that this dust is rich in," Reguitti concluded. "It's a different way of telling the old story that we are 'stardust.'"

The team's research is set to be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Astronomers have been given a new and incredibly detailed look at a very familiar astronomical object thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The new JWST image shows the Helix Nebula, the ring-like structure of which has led to the nickname the Eye of God.

The Helix Nebula is composed of stellar material shrugged off by a dying star as its outer layers were blasted away and its core collapsed to form a dense stellar remnant called a white dwarf. White dwarfs are the type of stellar corpses that are left behind when stars with similar masses as the sun run out of hydrogen in their cores and can no longer generate the energy to support themselves against the inward push of their own gravity. The remains that surround them are referred to as "planetary nebulas," even though they have nothing to do with planets at all.

That means that this intricate view of the Helix Nebula, located some 650 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Aquarius, gives scientists a hint of what is to come for our own star when it exhausts its hydrogen fuel in around 5 billion years. So, while this familiar sight for astronomers may look like a lava lamp in these images, it may actually serve as a crystal ball, foretelling doom for our solar system.

The Helix Nebula, also known as NGC 7293 or Caldwell 63, was first discovered by German astronomer Karl Ludwig Harding prior to 1824. It is one of the closest and brightest planetary nebulas that can be seen from Earth.

Since then, the Helix Nebula has been imaged by a vast array of telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, with the JWST joining the fray with an infrared image courtesy of its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam).

The image clearly traces winds of blisteringly hot gas emerging from the vicinity of the white dwarf stellar remnant at the heart of the Helix Nebula as they slam into outer shells of previously shed cold gas and dust. This demonstrates a sharp transition between the hot gas of this system and its coolest counterpart.

Not visible in the JWST image is the smoldering white dwarf in the center of the Helix Nebula, but astronomers can see the effect of the radiation it emits as it lights close surrounding gas, heating it and causing it to be ionized.

Further out from the stellar remnant are dust pockets of cold molecular hydrogen, in which conditions are just right for the formation of complex molecules. These could one day become the building blocks of new planets, and perhaps even life.Thus, perhaps this cosmic crystal ball also offers a look backwards billions of years into the past before the solar system took shape around our infant sun.