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    James Webb tagged posts

    James Webb catches an exoplanet losing its atmosphere in real time

    January 21, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    WASP-121b, a scorching gas giant orbiting its star every 30 hours, is literally bleeding its atmosphere into space. Astronomers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), the National Centre of Competence in Research PlanetS, and the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets (IREx) at the University of Montreal (UdeM) have made a major breakthrough using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). For the first time, researchers have followed gas escaping from an exoplanet’s atmosphere continuously over a full orbit around its star.

    The observations revealed an unexpected and dramatic result. The gas giant WASP-121b is surrounded by not one, but two enormous streams of helium that stretch across more than half of its orbit...

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    Webb explores effect of strong magnetic fields on star formation

    April 4, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The MeerKAT radio telescope shows the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, with a graphic pullout highlighting a much smaller region on the right, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope’s near-infrared light observations. The MeerKAT image is colored in blue, cyan, and yellow, with a very bright white-yellow center that indicates the location of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole. Painterly bubbles of various sizes, clouds, and vertical brushstroke-like streaks make up the radio image. The Webb inset shows stars and gas clouds in red, with an arching cloud of bright cyan that contains many straight, needle-like features that appear more crystalline than cloudy.
    An image of the Milky Way captured by the MeerKAT (formerly the Karoo Array Telescope) radio telescope array puts the James Webb Space Telescope’s image of the Sagittarius C region in context. Like a super-long exposure photograph, MeerKAT shows the bubble-like remnants of supernovas that exploded over millennia, capturing the dynamic nature of the Milky Way’s chaotic core. At the center of the MeerKAT image the region surrounding the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole blazes bright. Huge vertical filamentary structures echo those captured on a smaller scale by Webb in Sagittarius C’s blue-green hydrogen cloud.
    NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crowe (UVA), John Bally (CU), Ruben Fedriani (IAA-CSIC), Ian Heywood (Oxford)

    Follow-up research on a 2023 image of the Sagittarius ...

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    Introducing ‘UFO’ Galaxies—the Milky Way’s Dustier Cousins

    November 23, 2024, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Introducing 'UFO' galaxies—the Milky Way's dustier cousins
    Images of the same regions of space as observed by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This bright-red UFO galaxy, circled, was almost entirely invisible in the Hubble observations. Credit: Gibson et al, 2024, The Astrophysical Journal
    Images of the same region of space as observed by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This bright-red UFO galaxy, circled, was almost entirely invisible in the Hubble observations. (Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)

    In a new study, a team of astrophysicists led by CU Boulder has set out to unravel the mysteries of UFOs—not the alien spacecraft, but a class of unusually large and red galaxies that researchers have nicknamed Ultra-red Flattened Objects, or UFOs for short...

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    NASA’s Hubble, Webb probe surprisingly Smooth Disk around Vega

    November 3, 2024, Categories  Uncategorized

    Teams of astronomers used the combined power of NASA’s Hubble and James Webb space telescopes to revisit the legendary Vega disk.

    In the 1997 movie “Contact,” adapted from Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel, the lead character scientist Ellie Arroway (played by actor Jodi Foster) takes a space-alien-built wormhole ride to the star Vega. She emerges inside a snowstorm of debris encircling the star — but no obvious planets are visible.

    It looks like the filmmakers got it right.

    A team of astronomers at the University of Arizona, Tucson used NASA’s Hubble and James Webb space telescopes for an unprecedented in-depth look at the nearly 100-billion-mile-diameter debris disk encircling Vega. “Between the Hubble and Webb telescopes, you get this very clear view of Vega...

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