JWST tagged posts

The hunt for potentially habitable rocky planets in our galaxy has been the holy grail of exoplanet studies for decades. While the discovery of more than 5,900 exoplanets in more than 4,400 planetary systems has been a remarkable achievement, only a small fraction (217) have been confirmed as terrestrial—aka rocky or “Earth-like.” Furthermore, obtaining accurate information on a rocky exoplanet’s atmosphere is very difficult, since potentially habitable rocky planets are much smaller and tend to orbit closer to their stars.

Thanks to next-generation instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), exoplanet studies are transitioning from discovery to characterization...

For the first time, international researchers have pinpointed the moment when planets began to form around a star beyond the sun. Using the ALMA telescope, in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, and the James Webb Space Telescope, they have observed the creation of the first specks of planet-forming material—hot minerals just beginning to solidify. This finding marks the first time a planetary system has been identified at such an early stage in its formation and opens a window to the past of our own solar system.

“For the first time, we have identified the earliest moment when planet formation is initiated around a star other than our sun,” says Melissa McClure, a professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead author of the new study, publishe...

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 ...