JWST tagged posts

JWST just found evidence that some “super-Jupiters” may have formed like planets, not failed stars. A distant star system with four super-sized gas giants has revealed a surprise. Thanks to JWST’s powerful vision, astronomers detected sulfur in their atmospheres — a chemical clue that they formed like Jupiter, by slowly building solid cores. That’s unexpected because these planets are far bigger and orbit much farther from their star than models once allowed.

Gas giants are enormous planets made primarily of hydrogen and helium...

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...

Since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) went into operation, red dots in its images have puzzled researchers around the world. Now, researchers from the University of Copenhagen have explained these enigmatic findings, revealing the most violent forces in the universe concealed in a cocoon of ionized gas. The discovery is published in Nature.

Since December 2021, when the James Webb super telescope saw first light, some 1...

The platypus is one of evolution’s lovable, oddball animals. The creature seems to defy well-understood rules of biology by combining physical traits in a bizarre way. They’re egg-laying mammals with duck bills and beaver-like tails, and the males have venomous spurs on their hind feet. In that regard, it’s only fitting that astronomers describe some newly discovered oddball objects as “Astronomy’s Platypus.”

The discovery consists of nine galaxies that also have unusual properties and seem to defy categorization. The findings were recently presented at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix...