Webb Telescopes view face-on of spiral galaxy NGC 4254.

Webb launches on a cloudy day from an Arianne 5 rocket. The image shows the rocket just lifting off the pad with a plume of orange fire and a plume grey blue smoke extending well to the right against a slate blue sky.

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Webb's latest news releases in reverse chronological order going back to 2012.

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A few dozen white stars, some with Webb’s signature 8-point diffraction spikes, on the black background of space. Tightly packed, red-orange filaments extend horizontally from upper left to lower right, with a bulging upward curve on the right that is closer to the top. The filaments resemble wood grain.

NASA’s Webb Reveals Intricate Layers of Interstellar Dust, Gas

6 min read

Once upon a time, the core of a massive star collapsed, creating a shockwave that blasted outward, ripping the star apart as it went. When the shockwave reached the star’s surface, it punched through, generating a brief, intense pulse of…

Article6 days ago

Six Webb images of little red dots are combined in a two-row mosaic. Each little red dot is centered within a square frame and lies against the black background of space. Each dot has a yellow-white circular core surrounded by a red, fuzzy ring. White text in the top left corner of each box lists the source’s name from the Webb surveys, and its redshift. From left to right, the top row reads CEERS 14448, z = 4.75; NGDEEP 4321, z = 8.92; and PRIMER-COS 10539, z = 7.48. The bottom row reads CEERS 20320, z = 5.27; JADES 9186, z = 4.99; and PRIMER-UDS 17818, z = 6.40.

Newfound Galaxy Class May Indicate Early Black Hole Growth, Webb Finds

6 min read

In December 2022, less than six months after commencing science operations, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope revealed something never seen before: numerous red objects that appear small on the sky, which scientists soon called “little red dots” (LRDs). Though these…

Article6 days ago

A portion of Webb’s 2023 observation of Wolf-Rayet 140. A bright white hexagon is toward the bottom left-center. This is the two stars. Blue diffraction spikes point diagonally toward 8, 11, and 1 o’clock. Surrounding the central light are a series of regularly spaced rings. A segment of each of the rings at around 2 o’clock appears brighter. These bright patches form a line that travels to the upper right. A few blue background dots are on the black background of space.

Webb Watches Carbon-Rich Dust Shells Form, Expand in Star System

6 min read

Astronomers have long tried to track down how elements like carbon, which is essential for life, become widely distributed across the universe. Now, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has examined one ongoing source of carbon-rich dust in our own Milky…

Article1 week ago

Swirling reds, whites, and light yellows mix around in front of a starry sky.

NASA Research To Be Featured at American Astronomical Society Meeting

6 min read

From new perspectives on the early universe to illuminating the extreme environment near a black hole, discoveries from NASA missions will be highlighted at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS). The meeting will take place Jan. 12-16…

Article1 week ago

The center of the image contains arcs of orange and pink that form a boat-like shape. One end of these arcs points to the top right of the image, while the other end point toward the bottom left. Another plume of orange and pink expands from the center to the top left of the image. To the right of this plume is a large cluster of white stars. There are various other white stars and a few galaxies of different sizes spread throughout the image. Ten, small, yellow circles overlaid at various points across the image indicate the positions of the ten stars surveyed in this study.

NASA’s Webb Finds Planet-Forming Disks Lived Longer in Early Universe

7 min read

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just solved a conundrum by proving a controversial finding made with the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope more than 20 years ago. In 2003, Hubble provided evidence of a massive planet around a very old star,…

Article1 month ago

NASA Successfully Integrates Roman Mission’s Telescope, Instruments

4 min read

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team has successfully integrated the mission’s telescope and two instruments onto the instrument carrier, marking the completion of the Roman payload. Now the team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will…

Article1 month ago

Hundreds of overlapping objects at various distances are spread across this field. Galaxies’ colors vary. The majority appear orange, pink, and white, some are shades of orange or blue. Most galaxies appear as fuzzy ovals, but a few have distinctive spiral arms. At the very center is a tiny galaxy nicknamed Firefly Sparkle that looks like a long, angled, dotted line. Smaller companions are nearby.

Found: First Actively Forming Galaxy as Lightweight as Young Milky Way

6 min read

For the first time, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has detected and “weighed” a galaxy that not only existed around 600 million years after the big bang, but is also similar to what our Milky Way galaxy’s mass might have…

Article1 month ago

Image of a galaxy on the black background of space. The galaxy is a very oblong, blue disk that extends from left to right at an angle (from about 10 o’clock to 5 o’clock). The galaxy has a small bright core at the center. There is an inner disk that is clearer, with speckles of stars scattered throughout. The outer disk of the galaxy is whiteish-blue, and clumpy, like clouds in the sky. There are different colored dots, distant galaxies, speckled among the black background of space surrounding the galaxy.

Hats Off to NASA’s Webb: Sombrero Galaxy Dazzles in New Image

5 min read

In a new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a galaxy named for its resemblance to a broad-brimmed Mexican hat appears more like an archery target. In Webb’s mid-infrared view of the Sombrero galaxy, also known as Messier 104…

Article2 months ago

Astronomers Find Early Fast-Feeding Black Hole Using NASA Telescopes

4 min read

A rapidly feeding black hole at the center of a dwarf galaxy in the early universe, shown in this artist’s concept, may hold important clues to the evolution of supermassive black holes in general. Using data from NASA’s James Webb…

Article2 months ago

The top-left half of the image is a Hubble Space Telescope view of a 100-billion-mile-wide disk of dust around the summer star Vega. The disk is represented in blue. The color trails to white as we get closer to the center of the disk. The black spot at the center blocks out the bright glow of the hot young star. The disk is perfectly circular because we are looking down on top of it. The lower-right half of the image is a view from the James Webb Space Telescope, which reveals the glow of warm dust in the disk's halo that is colored orange. The disk is brighter toward the center. There is a notable dip in surface brightness between the inner and outer disk.

NASA’s Hubble, Webb Probe Surprisingly Smooth Disk Around Vega

6 min read

In the 1997 movie “Contact,” adapted from Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel, the lead character scientist Ellie Arroway (played by actor Jodi Foster) takes a space-alien-built wormhole ride to the star Vega. She emerges inside a snowstorm of debris encircling the…

Article3 months ago

Two spiral galaxies take the shape of a colorful beaded mask that sits above the nose. The galaxy at left, IC 2163, is smaller, taking up a little over a quarter of the view. The galaxy at right, NGC 2207, takes up half the view, with its spiral arms reaching the edges. IC 2163 has a bright orange core, with two prominent spiral arms that rotate counter clockwise and become straighter towards the ends, the left side extending almost to the edge. Its arms are a mix of pink, white, and blue, with an area that takes the shape of an eyelid appearing whitest. NGC 2207 has a very bright core. Overall, it appears to have larger, thicker spiral arms that spin counter clockwise. This galaxy also contains more and larger blue areas of star formation that poke out like holes from the pink spiral arms. In the middle, the galaxies’ arms appear to overlap. The edges show the black background of space, including extremely distant galaxies that look like orange and red smudges, and a few foreground stars.

‘Blood-Soaked’ Eyes: NASA’s Webb, Hubble Examine Galaxy Pair

5 min read

Stare deeply at these galaxies. They appear as if blood is pumping through the top of a flesh-free face. The long, ghastly “stare” of their searing eye-like cores shines out into the supreme cosmic darkness. It’s good fortune that looks…

Article3 months ago

Artist’s concept of Centaur 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 as seen from the side against a dark, mostly starless swath of space. The rocky, bilobed nucleus is toward the right and resembles the simplified shape of a peanut. The left side of the centaur is partially illuminated by the Sun, which is off-screen, revealing the nucleus’ light brown surface. Four jets of gas, depicted as translucent cones of white, emanate from various points on the Centaur’s surface and extend beyond the frame: two emanate upward from the top, one jet spews from the bottom and extends downward, and one jet emanates from the left side of the nucleus and extends toward the left. A label in the bottom left corner reads “Artist’s Concept.”

NASA’s Webb Reveals Unusual Jets of Volatile Gas from Icy Centaur 29P

7 min read

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…

Article4 months ago

A black background sprinkled with small, colorful galaxies in orange, blue, and white. On the left, a third of the way down from the top of the image, a very faint dot of a galaxy is outlined with a white square and pulled out in a graphic to be shown magnified. In the pullout square to the right, the galaxy is a hazy white dot edged in orange, with faint blue projections opposite each other at the 11 o’clock and 5 o’clock positions.

In Odd Galaxy, NASA’s Webb Finds Potential Missing Link to First Stars

4 min read

Looking deep into the early universe with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have found something unprecedented: a galaxy with an odd light signature, which they attribute to its gas outshining its stars. Found approximately one billion years after the…

Article4 months ago

A pair of interacting galaxies. The larger of the two galaxies is slightly right of center, and composed of a hazy, bright, white center and a ring of gaseous filaments, which are different shades of red and orange. Toward the bottom left and bottom right of the ring are filaments of gas spiraling inward toward the core. At the top left of the ring is a noticeable gap, bordered by two large, orange pockets of dust and gas. The smaller galaxy to its left is made of hazy white gas and dust, which becomes more diffuse farther away from its center. To this galaxy’s bottom left, there is a smaller, more diffuse gas cloud that wafts outward toward the edges. Many red, orange, and white galaxies are spread throughout, with some hazier in composition and others having more defined spiral patterns.

NASA’s Webb Provides Another Look Into Galactic Collisions

4 min read

Smile for the camera! An interaction between an elliptical galaxy and a spiral galaxy, collectively known as Arp 107, seems to have given the spiral a happier outlook thanks to the two bright “eyes” and the wide semicircular “smile.” The…

Article4 months ago

At center right is a compact star cluster composed of luminous red, blue, and white points of light. Faint jets with clumpy, diffuse material extend in various directions from the bright cluster. Above and to the right is a smaller cluster of stars. Translucent red wisps of material stretch across the scene, though there are patches and a noticeable gap in the top left corner that reveal the black background of space. Background galaxies are scattered across this swath of space, appearing as small blue-white and orange-white dots or fuzzy, thin disks. There are two noticeably larger points, foreground stars, with diffraction spikes: an orange-white point on the left, and a blue-white point in the top right.

NASA’s Webb Peers into the Extreme Outer Galaxy

5 min read

Astronomers have directed NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to examine the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy. Scientists call this region the Extreme Outer Galaxy due to its location more than 58,000 light-years away from the Galactic Center. (For comparison,…

Article4 months ago

Amid a field of galaxies, a repeated, elongated red galaxy forms a shape like the top of a question mark, with another galaxy positioned like the question mark’s dot. In each occurrence, another white, clumpy galaxy with an overall circular shape appears perched on top of the red galaxy. A very bright foreground galaxy appears to the right of the bottom curve of the question mark shape. To the lower right, among other galaxies, another occurrence of the galaxy pair appears, unaffiliated with the question mark shape.

NASA’s Webb Reveals Distorted Galaxy Forming Cosmic Question Mark

5 min read

It’s 7 billion years ago, and the universe’s heyday of star formation is beginning to slow. What might our Milky Way galaxy have looked like at that time? Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have found clues in the…

Article5 months ago

Hundreds of small galaxies against the black background of space. Several white spiral galaxies are near image center. Most of the galaxies are various shades of orange and red, and many are too tiny to discern a shape. A handful of foreground stars show Webb's six diffraction spikes.

Webb Finds Early Galaxies Weren’t Too Big for Their Britches After All

5 min read

It got called the crisis in cosmology. But now astronomers can explain some surprising recent discoveries. When astronomers got their first glimpses of galaxies in the early universe from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, they were expecting to find galactic…

Article5 months ago

Side-by-side images of the Pillars of Creation from Hubble (left) and Webb (right). In the visible view from Hubble, the pillars appear thick, dusty, and brown with yellow streamers along their edges. The background of this Hubble image is like a sunrise, beginning in yellows at the bottom, before transitioning to light green and deeper blues at the top. In Webb's near-infrared view, the pillars appear brighter in orange and yellowish tones, with fainter blue streamers along the edges. The background in Webb’s image appears in blue hues with a many more stars than can be seen in visible light.

AstroViz: Iconic Pillars of Creation Star in NASA’s New 3D Visualization

4 min read

NASA’s Universe of Learning – a partnership among the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Caltech/IPAC, the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and part of the NASA Science Activation program portfolio – recently released…

Article6 months ago

How NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Will Illuminate Cosmic Dawn

6 min read

Today, enormous stretches of space are crystal clear, but that wasn’t always the case. During its infancy, the universe was filled with a “fog” that made it opaque, cloaking the first stars and galaxies. NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space…

Article6 months ago

This image shows the exoplanet Epsilon Indi Ab. The image is mostly black, with blue scale-like features apparent in the central region of the image. At the center of the image, there is a black circle, and in the center, a symbol representing a star. This black circle blocks the light from the host star. To the lower left of the circle is a fuzzy bright orange circle, which is the exoplanet.

NASA’s Webb Images Cold Exoplanet 12 Light-Years Away

6 min read

An international team of astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has directly imaged an exoplanet roughly 12 light-years from Earth. The planet, Epsilon Indi Ab, is one of the coldest exoplanets observed to date. The planet is several times…

Article6 months ago

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Red dual opposing jets coming from young stars fill the darker top half of the image, while a glowing pale-yellow, cave-like structure is bottom center, tilted toward two o’clock, with a bright star at its center. See extended description for more.

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This visualization of a gravity model shows variations in Earth's gravity field. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Texas Center for Space Research

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