James Webb Space Telescope tagged posts

Astronomers have spotted something surprising in the far outer Solar System—a faint, short-lived atmosphere clinging to a tiny icy world that shouldn’t be able to hold one at all. The object, called 2002XV93, is far smaller than Pluto, yet observations during a rare stellar alignment revealed its presence through a subtle dimming of starlight. Even more puzzling, calculations suggest this atmosphere should vanish within about 1,000 years unless it’s constantly being replenished.

A group of professional and amateur astronomers in Japan has uncovered evidence that a small, distant object in the outer Solar System is surrounded by a thin atmosp...

An international team of astronomers has achieved a first in probing the early universe, using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), detecting a supernova—the explosive death of a massive star—at an unprecedented cosmic distance.

The explosion, designated SN in GRB 250314A, occurred when the universe was only about 730 million years old, placing it deep in the era of reionization. This remarkable discovery provides a direct look at the final moments of a massive star from a time when the first stars and galaxies were just beginning to form.

The event, which has ...

Understanding how the universe transitioned from darkness to light with the formation of the first stars and galaxies is a key turning point in the universe’s development, known as the Cosmic Dawn. However, even with the most powerful telescopes, we can’t directly observe these earliest stars, so determining their properties is one of the biggest challenges in astronomy.

Now, an international group of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge has shown that we will be able to learn about the masses of the earliest stars by studying a specific radio signal—created by hydrogen atoms filling the gaps between star-forming regions—originating just a hundred million years after the Big Bang.

By studying how the first stars and their remnants affected this signal, called the 2...

Neptune lies in the frigid, dark, vast frontier of the outer edges of our solar system, about 3 billion miles away from the sun.

For the first time, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured bright auroral activity on Neptune. Auroras occur when energetic particles, often originating from the sun, become trapped in a planet’s magnetic field and eventually strike the upper atmosphere. The energy released during these collisions creates the signature glow.

In the past, astronomers have seen tantalizing hints of auroral activity on Neptune, for example, in the flyby of NASA’s Voyager 2 in 1989. However, imaging and confirming the auroras on Neptune has long evaded astronomers despite successful detections on Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus...