JWST tagged posts

An international team of astronomers today announced the discovery of the two earliest and most distant galaxies ever seen, dating back to only 300 million years after the Big Bang. These results, using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), mark a major milestone in the study of the early universe.

The discoveries were made by the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) team. Daniel Eisenstein from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) is one of the team leaders of JADES and Principal Investigator of the observing program that revealed these galaxies...

Using new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered methane emission on a brown dwarf, an unexpected finding for such a cold and isolated world. Published in the journal Nature, the findings suggest that this brown dwarf might generate aurorae similar to those seen on our own planet as well as on Jupiter and Saturn.

More massive than planets but lighter than stars, brown dwarfs are ubiquitous in our solar neighborhood, with thousands identified. Last year, Jackie Faherty, a senior research scientist and senior education manager at the American Museum of Natural History, led a team of researchers who were awarded time on JWST to investigate 12 brown dwarfs.

Among those was CWISEP J193518.59–154620...

Up to a certain point, very luminous stars can have a positive effect on the formation of planets, but from that point on the radiation they emit can cause the material in protoplanetary discs to disperse.

To find out how planetary systems such as our Solar System form, an international research team including scientists from the University of Cologne studied a stellar nursery, the Orion Nebula, using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). By observing a protoplanetary disc named d203-506, they discovered the key role massive stars play in the formation of planetary systems that are less than a million years old...

Astrophysicists studying a popular exoplanet in its star’s habitable zone have found that electric currents in the planet’s upper atmosphere could create sufficient heating to expand the atmosphere enough that it leaves the planet, likely leaving the planet uninhabitable.

Until now, planetary scientists have thought that a habitable planet needs a strong magnetic field surrounding it to act as a shield, directing ionized particles, X-rays and ultraviolet radiation in the stellar wind around and away from its atmosphere.
That’s what happens on Earth, preventing dangerous radiation from reaching life on the surface, and what does not occur on Mars, which now lacks a global magnetic field, meaning any initial inhabitants of the red planet will probably need to live in underground caves...