Webb Telescope tagged posts

Webb telescope sees galaxy in mysteriously clearing fog of early universe

Astronomers have identified a bright hydrogen emission from a galaxy in the very early universe. The surprise finding is challenging researchers to explain how this light could have pierced the thick fog of neutral hydrogen that filled space at that time.

A key goal of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has been to see further than ever before into the distant past of our universe, when the first galaxies were forming after the Big Bang, a period known as cosmic dawn.

Researchers studying one of those very early galaxies have now made a discovery in the spectrum of its light, that challenges our established understanding of the universe’s early history. Their results are reported in the journal Nature.

Webb discovered the incredibly distant galaxy JADES-GS-z13-1, obs...

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Webb Telescope Detects Unusual Gas Jets from Centaur 29P

Centaur 29P Outgassing (Artist’s Concept)

Inspired by the half-human, half-horse creatures that are part of Ancient Greek mythology, the field of astronomy has its own kind of centaurs: distant objects orbiting the sun between Jupiter and Neptune. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has mapped the gases spewing from one of these objects, suggesting a varied composition and providing new insights into the formation and evolution of the solar system.

Centaurs are former trans-Neptunian objects that have been moved inside Neptune’s orbit by subtle gravitational influences of the planets in the last few million years, and may eventually become short-period comets...

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Webb Telescope Detects most Distant Active Supermassive Black Hole

CEERS-NIRCam-crop2400x1600
A zoomed-in view of images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope in near-infrared light for the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey. Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Steve Finkelstein (UT Austin), Micaela Bagley (UT Austin), Rebecca Larson (UT Austin).

Researchers have discovered the most distant active supermassive black hole to date with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The galaxy, CEERS 1019, existed about 570 million years after the big bang, and its black hole is less massive than any other yet identified in the early universe.

In addition to the black hole in CEERS 1019, the researchers identified two more black holes that are on the smaller side and existed 1 billion and 1.1 billion years after the big bang...

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Webb Telescope finds Towering Plume of Water escaping from one of Saturn’s Moons

Courtesy of NASA/ESA/CSA/Alyssa Pagan (STScI)/Geronimo Villanueva (NASA-GSFC) SwRI contributed to new Cycle 1 JWST findings that show the plume of water escaping from Saturn’s moon Enceladus extends 6,000 miles or more than 40 times the moon’s size. In light of this discovery, SwRI’s Dr. Christopher Glein was awarded a NASA JWST Cycle 2 allocation to study the plume as well as the icy surface of Enceladus, to better understand the potential habitability of this ocean world.

Two Southwest Research Institute scientists were part of a James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) team that observed a towering plume of water vapor more than 6,000 miles long—roughly the distance from the U.S. to Japan—spewing from the surface of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus...

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