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    JWST tagged posts

    Nearby rocky may be replenishing helium from atmosphere, study finds

    July 17, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Nearly a decade after the discovery of LHS 1140b, a rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone of a nearby low-mass star, a new study reveals that the object may have its own atmosphere.

    University of Florida Assistant Professor of Astronomy Jason Dittmann first discovered the planet in 2016. Now, he is a co-author of the new study, published in Science, that uses helium escape to explain a potential atmosphere.

    “The exciting part about this paper, and why I think it was accepted into Science, was that this is the first time that we’re seeing a rocky, Earth-like planet that could still have an atmosphere,” Dittmann said.

    How the planet was found
    The Magellan Clay telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile showed evidence of helium escaping from the planet...

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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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    Saturn-sized exoplanet with Earth-like temperature reveals methane-rich atmosphere

    May 23, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Grey planet with host star in background
    Artist’s impression of a gas giant planet orbiting its distant host star. New research, led by astronomers at Penn State and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to analyze the atmosphere of a gas giant planet about the size of Saturn but with Earth-like temperatures and found it to be rich in methane. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. All Rights Reserved.

    A planet that is about the size of Saturn, but with a temperature more like Earth’s, has an atmosphere rich in methane, according to a new study using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

    Unlike the gas giant planets—Jupiter and Saturn—in Earth’s solar system, which are distant from the sun and therefore extremely cold, and so-called “hot Jupiters”—giant planets beyond the solar system that are s...

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    ALMA and JWST investigate giant disk galaxy’s formation and evolution

    April 19, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Astronomers investigate the formation and evolution of a giant disc galaxy
    ALMA and JWST imaging of ADF22.1. Credit: arXiv (2026). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2604.07440

    European astronomers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe a recently discovered giant disk galaxy known as ADF22.1. Results of the new observations, published April 8 on the arXiv preprint server, shed more light on the formation and evolution of this galaxy.

    A unique laboratory
    ADF22.1, also known as ADF22.A1, is a giant disk barred spiral galaxy residing in a protocluster known as SSA22 at a redshift of 3.09. It has an effective radius of some 22,800 light years and a stellar mass of about 100 billion solar masses...

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