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    James Webb Space Telescope tagged posts

    Webb provides crash course on planet-shattering collisions

    October 2, 2026, Categories  Uncategorized

    Artist’s concept of a star and its debris disk against the black background of space. The star is in the background, right of center, and depicted as a small, luminous sphere. The debris disk is a large blue ring that encircles the star. The debris disk is angled toward the viewer, so that the portion nearest to the viewer extends beyond the bottom frame of the illustration. Many dark, rocky fragments are scattered throughout the debris disk. In the foreground, toward the left, is a small planetary embryo colliding into the left side of a larger spherical object. The impact site glows bright yellow and orange and has a mottled appearance, as though chunks of both colliding bodies are breaking up and being destroyed. Orange-yellow streams of vapor extend outward from the collision area. Behind the debris disk and its star are many small stars in the background. A label in the bottom right corner reads “Artist’s Concept.”
    The types of collisions within young stellar systems known as extreme debris disks are relevant to scientists’ understanding of our own solar system, which is thought to have undergone similar impact events that created our Moon and shaped Earth’s initial state.
    Artwork: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

    In the early history of our solar system, scientists theorize that a Mars-sized object called Theia smashed into the infant Earth, vaporizing massive amounts of rock and blasting it into space. Some of that material coalesced into the moon, where NASA’s Artemis program is returning humans, preparing for Mars and shaping the future of space exploration.

    That long-ago, violent collision reshaped our home planet...

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    JWST captures rare glimpse of early black hole growing inside network of young galaxies

    July 24, 2026, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have captured one of the clearest views yet of how an early supermassive black hole may grow within a network of young galaxies. The compact active galaxy, seen just a billion years after the Big Bang, lies beside a 12,000-parsec-long filament containing multiple galaxies that are expected to merge within a few hundred million years.

    The findings, posted to the arXiv preprint server on July 6, suggest astronomers may be witnessing a short-lived phase in the evolution of rapidly growing black holes while also shedding light on how the first massive galaxies assembled in the early universe.

    Too big for its galaxy
    Since JWST began operating, astronomers have found a population of compact, actively feeding black holes in galaxies from ...

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    Astronomers may have caught an early galaxy in the process of dying

    July 5, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Astronomers may have caught an early galaxy in the process of dying
    JWST imaging of the RPS galaxy C26 in SPT2349–56. (a) Red-green-blue image of the protocluster core (blue: NIRCam/F200W; green: NIRCam/F444W; red: MIRI/F1000W). The RPS galaxy C26 is marked by the red rectangle. The cross labels the kinematic center of the protocluster. (b–d) Zoomed images of C26 in F200W, F444W, and F1000W, respectively. credit: DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.18229

    Astronomers have spotted many “red and dead” galaxies in the early universe. These are massive systems that stopped forming stars surprisingly early in cosmic history. Now, they may have found evidence of one in the act of becoming dead: a massive galaxy being stripped of its starforming gas just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang...

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    Webb spots the birth of a giant galaxy and a supermassive black hole

    June 24, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to catch an extraordinary glimpse of a massive galaxy taking shape in the early universe. They identified a compact group of at least six galaxies that are likely to merge into a single enormous system. At the heart of this cosmic construction site lies a growing supermassive black hole.

    The international study was led by astronomers at Leiden University and the University of Oxford. The findings have been published in The Open Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy & Astrophysics.

    The system observed, TGSSJ1530+1049, lies more than 12 billion light-years away. We are seeing it as it was when the universe was only about 1.5 billion years old...

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