Tag: JWST

When walking down the street, one cannot escape the realization that dogs pay attention to dogs, babies focus on babies, and adults greet adults. This brings home the sense that when looking out we will most likely recognize extraterrestrial technological signatures that resemble those that we posse...

Today, even the most massive of the known black holes represent only about 0.1% of the stellar mass of the galaxy: just one-thousandth of the amount of mass found by summing up all the stars in the galactic environment surrounding it. For a long time, astronomers have wondered just how these superma...

If there’s one rule that’s practically universal in astronomy, it’s this: you can only observe the parts of the Universe that your instruments are sensitive to. As a result, when most of us think about the objects that are out there in the cosmos, we think about the components that...

From its very first glimpse of the distant Universe, JWST has shocked astronomers. This almost-perfectly-aligned image composite shows the first JWST deep field’s view of the core of cluster SMACS 0723 and contrasts it with the older Hubble view. The JWST image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0...

There’s a recipe to seeing farther back in time than ever before. The blank region of sky, shown in the yellow L-shaped box, was the region chosen to be the observing location of the original Hubble Deep Field image. With no known stars or galaxies within it, in a region devoi...

Although it might seem that the world changed long ago from the Hubble era to the JWST era, the reality is that humanity’s greatest space-based observatory of all-time is less than two years old. It launched on Christmas Day, 2021, and required six months of deployment, commissioning, and cali...

From its very first glimpse of the distant Universe, JWST has shocked astronomers. This almost-perfectly-aligned image composite shows the first JWST deep field’s view of the core of cluster SMACS 0723 and contrasts it with the older Hubble view. The JWST image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0...

All stars eventually exhaust their nuclear fuel, running out of fusible material. The Egg Nebula, as imaged here by Hubble, is a preplanetary nebula, as its outer layers have not yet been heated to sufficient temperatures by the central, contracting star. Many of the giant stars visible today...