JWST

Almost everything anyone knows about when the Solar System began rests on a few pale specks inside meteorites. They are calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions, grains condensed from hot gas close to the…

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has measured the distance to what the agency calls the most distant fast radio burst seen to date, and the galaxy it came from is a small dwarf rather than the…

Aim the James Webb Space Telescope at a deep enough patch of sky and tiny, intensely red specks emerge from the noise, most numerous in the earliest parts of the universe. Look at the same kind of…

Astronomers have measured the oxygen in nine of the earliest known galaxies directly, instead of inferring it from the indirect calibrations the field normally falls back on at these distances.…

Astronomers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have assembled 21 young star systems whose dust appears to be the wreckage of collisions between rocky bodies, and have sorted them into two groups…

Astronomers have collected light from far earlier in cosmic history than this. What they have rarely had, that far out, is a case with enough evidence to narrow down what they are seeing. A faint dot…

Every image the James Webb Space Telescope sends home is really a stack of images. Its near-infrared camera does not gather light for a few minutes and then read the detector once at the end. It…

Infrared telescopes have handed astronomers something that looks like a rule: the fewer heavy elements a galaxy holds, the less it glows in the infrared bands produced by polycyclic aromatic…

Oxygen, carbon and silicon were already streaming out of galaxies when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, according to a study published Sept. 24 in the journal Nature Astronomy.…

The James Webb Space Telescope has recorded methane giving off light rather than absorbing it in the atmosphere of a young brown dwarf, in what the observing team reports as the first detection of…

Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to take mid-infrared spectra of large soot-like carbon molecules in five ordinary star-forming galaxies at a redshift of about 1, the era known as…

The Milky Way ate its neighbors, and the meals left traces. Stars pulled in from galaxies that fell into ours billions of years ago still thread through the outer Galaxy on orbits far more stretched…