JWST tagged posts

An international team of scientists led by astronomers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison has produced the most accurate measurement of the gases swirling around young stars and how their mass changes over time. The discovery joins many pieces of a puzzle that may reveal which kinds of planets form—rocky Earth-types, gas giants like Jupiter, or balls of ice in the Neptune mold—as star systems mature.

The researchers used an array of 66 massive radio telescopes, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, perched at 16,000 feet in the Chilean Andes Mountains, to study the disks of gas spinning in the gravity of each of 3...

Largest map of the universe announced revealing 800,000 galaxies, challenging early cosmos theories

In the name of open science, the multinational scientific collaboration COSMOS on Thursday released the data behind the largest map of the universe. Called the COSMOS-Web field, the project, built with data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), consists of all the imaging and a catalog of nearly 800,000 galaxies spanning nearly all of cosmic time. And it’s been challenging existing notions of the infant universe.

“Our goal was to construct this deep field of space ...

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured its first direct images of carbon dioxide in a planet outside the solar system in HR8799, a multiplanet system 130 light-years away that has long been a key target for planet formation studies.

The observations provide strong evidence that the system’s four giant planets ...

-Advancing the search for weird life on weird planets

Scientists have identified a promising new way to detect life on faraway planets, hinging on worlds that look nothing like Earth and gases rarely considered in the search for extraterrestrials.

In a new Astrophysical Journal Letters paper, researchers from the University of California, Riverside, describe these gases, which could be detected in the atmospheres of exoplanets – planets outside our solar system – with the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST.

Called methyl halides, the gases comprise a methyl group, which bears a carbon and three hydrogen atoms, attached to a halogen atom such as chlo...