JWST tagged posts

Most of us could spend our entire lives looking at the night sky and see very few changes. The moon becomes more or less illuminated, the planets drift placidly through the sky, satellites and the ISS intrude for a few moments at a time, and the bright, momentary streak of a meteor punctuates the occasional evening of stargazing.

If we’re really lucky, we get a chance to witness one of the prominent comets: a regular visitor like Halley’s Comet, or a once-in-several-millennia comet like Hale-Bopp. A very small number of us might be truly fortunate and witness a distant supernova.

But the apparent uneventfulness of the night sky is an illusion, even for those with a typical backyard telescope. It’s the result of a selection bias based on our ability to see only visible light...

A Jupiter-sized world just 7.5 light-years away is cloudy, chemically complex and, it turns out, more like home than anyone expected. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, Brittany Miles, assistant astronomer at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, led a team that spent 11 hours staring at WISE 0855, the coldest known brown dwarf, collecting a spectrum of its light every 15 minutes.

The result is the most detailed time-series portrait ever taken of this frigid world—and the first direct confirmation that water clouds on another body are changing thickness over time, just like we...

JWST reveals that newborn planets are racing against powerful winds and radiation before their supply of planet-building gas disappears. JWST has revealed that young planetary systems lose their planet-building gas through a changing mix of powerful jets, molecular winds, and radiation-driven outflows. As the disks age and their gas disappears, giant planets face a shrinking window to build massive atmospheres.

Planets take shape inside disks of gas and dust surrounding young stars, but the supply of gas they depend on is temporary...

Of all the discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope, the multitude of Little Red Dots it has observed is among the most enigmatic. Now, simulations using the Japanese Supercomputer ATERUI III have explained the nature of the Little Red Dots without requiring any exotic assumptions. The simulations show that the Little Red Dots are black holes growing at a rate that would be impossible today because of conditions in the early universe.

In the study, published in the journal Nature, a research team led by Sunmyon Chon at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics used the ATERUI I...