Tag: James Webb Space Telescope

At this point, astronomers are used to the James Webb Space Telescope pushing the boundaries of astronomy — so it is little surprise that the $10 billion telescope has surpassed itself again.  The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — with a little help from the Hubble Space Telescope — may have found a family of so-called “failed star” brown dwarfs in the Milky Way’s satellite galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). If this is the case, it will be the first time astronomers have spotted such bodies beyond the limits…

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Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have captured a stunning image of a distant supernova in a galaxy that looks like it’s being stretched like warm taffy. However, the golden smear hiding this gravitationally lensed supernova, which has been nicknamed “supernova Hope,” isn’t just remarkable for its aesthetic value. The supernova, which exploded when the 13.8-billion-year-old universe was just around 3.5 billion years old, tells us something about a huge problem in cosmology called the “Hubble tension.”  The Hubble tension comes from the fact that scientists can’t agree on…

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In a pocket of the universe teeming with galaxies, the James Webb Space Telescope has zeroed in on one blazing so brightly it outshines its stars. The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted the galaxy named GS-NDG-9422 — a realm that existed about one billion years after the Big Bang, and indeed one that may provide the missing link of galaxy evolution between the universe’s first stars and well-structured galaxies. GS-NDG-9422 “will help us understand how the cosmic story began,” Alex Cameron, an observational astronomer at the University of Oxford…

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Astronomers often have more questions than answers about the universe — and the universe, in turn, has asked its own question. Quite literally. Last year, the James Webb Space Telescope fortuitously spotted the unmistakable shape of a question mark across the sky. The uncanny feature was captured lurking at the bottom of an image of a pair of forming stars in the Vela constellation roughly 1,470 light-years from Earth. The picture soon went viral on social media sites, prompting a myriad of guesses of its nature, from a sign of…

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It would appear that James Webb Space Telescope observations of 10 nearby galaxies suggests the Hubble tension — which is a puzzling discrepancy in measurements regarding the rate of the expansion of the universe — may not be real after all. The James Webb Space Telescope‘s observations put the average value of the Hubble constant (H0), key in determining the rate at which the universe is expanding, at 69.96 kilometers per second per megaparsec. This is indeed consistent with predictions stemming from the standard model of cosmology, which should sound…

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Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers discovered that Ariel, a moon of Uranus, could be hiding in a buried liquid water ocean.  The discovery could supply an answer to a mystery surrounding this Uranian moon that has perplexed scientists: the fact Ariel’s surface is covered with a significant amount of carbon dioxide ice. This is puzzling because at the distance Uranus and its moons exist from the sun, 20 times further out from the sun than Earth, carbon dioxide turns to gas and is lost to space. This…

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered stormy weather in the sky of two brown dwarfs in the most detailed weather report yet from such “failed stars.” The two brown dwarfs form a binary pair called WISE 1049AB that was discovered by NASA‘s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) in 2013; the duo sits just 6.5 light-years away from us. They are the closest brown dwarfs to our sun, and thus make an excellent target for the James Webb Space Telescope‘s powerful infrared instruments. A brown dwarf is an object…

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What’s the James Webb Space Telescope’s favorite movie? Eternal sunshine of the exoplanet WASP-39 b, perhaps. In a new study, data from the James Webb Space Telescope reveals details of this mysterious gas giant exoplanet, which orbits a star about 700 light-years away from Earth. WASP-39 b is tidally locked to that star, which means the same side of the planet always faces its star. In other words, half of the planet experiences perpetual day, and the other experiences perpetual night. But the dividing line isn’t black and white — there’s a…

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To celebrate two years since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) started sending images back to Earth, NASA has released yet another stunning image taken by the revolutionary space telescope. The second-anniversary JWST image shows two interacting galaxies that make up a single object called Arp 142, which appears like a cosmic penguin with its cosmic egg. Fittingly for a celebration of the JWST’s two years of science results, the new image is a two-for-two. Arp 142’s Penguin and Egg scene comprises two interacting galaxies located around 326 million light-years from…

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