JWST

Point a telescope at a nearby star and, mostly, the star is all you get. The ring of rock, boulders and collision dust around it — the leftover scaffolding of planet building, the same kind of belt…

Thirteen transiting giant exoplanets observed by JWST fall on the same color-magnitude sequence as free-floating brown dwarfs at similar temperatures, and the methane expected in the planets'…

Astronomers have mapped the jets and winds streaming away from 72 planet-forming disks and report that the outflows shift from molecular to atomic as the star draws in less material. The survey,…

Draw every known rocky planet on one chart, how hard its star bakes it, against how firmly its gravity holds on, and a line appears. Below the line, worlds keep an atmosphere. Above it, they are…

Stand on the daylit side of TOI-561 b and there would be nothing underfoot but rock hot enough to run like water. It is a rocky planet a little larger than Earth, orbiting so close to its star that a…

The first JWST transit spectra of TRAPPIST-1 f rule out hydrogen- and helium-dominated atmospheres with surface pressures higher than about 20 millibars, at 95% confidence, a team led by Olivia Lim…

Nine massive galaxies that stopped making stars long ago hold far more small, faint stars than the Milky Way's mix would predict, astronomers report — enough that the earliest big galaxies found by…