project
A large infrared space observatory launched in 2021, operated by NASA with ESA and CSA, studying distant galaxies, exoplanets, and star formation.
Cosmologists' simulations suggest primordial magnetic fields may have sped hydrogen formation, shifting the 67 km/s/Mpc rate read from the CMB. That gives the 6 km/s/Mpc Hubble tension a physical cause.
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Harley Katz's team at the University of Chicago ran three years of simulations showing the Milky Way assembling from thousands of smaller galaxies. Published across six papers, the models can now be checked against what Webb actually records.
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University of Arizona astronomers used JWST to detect carbon and oxygen flowing out of three galaxies seen 500 million years after the Big Bang. The result suggests heavy elements spread earlier than astronomers expected, though three galaxies picked from hundreds of spectra cannot yet show how common such outflows were.
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Kate Su's team used Webb and Spitzer spectra of 21 extreme debris disks to infer that about a third come from vaporizing impacts between Mars-sized bodies. Silica marks those violent cases, and it turns up only around stars younger than 300 million years.
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University of Bath-led MEGATRON team published four papers arguing early-universe models must track starlight, gas and new elements together. Their simulations suggest simpler models understate how stellar radiation and chemistry shape the gas around young galaxies.
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Helium reported escaping LHS 1140b, a habitable-zone planet 1.7 times Earth's size, may signal a long-lived secondary atmosphere around a red dwarf. The result is tenuous and the planet could still be a mini-Neptune, so its use as a test of whether red-dwarf worlds keep their air depends on confirmation.
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Pablo Santos-Sanz's team used the James Webb Space Telescope to find Chariklo's inner ring 42% more opaque and its outer ring barely visible. Occultations are rare, so for now the team can show that the rings changed but not why, or how long they will last.
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Astronomers led by the University of Arizona's Naman Bajaj used archival JWST data on 72 young Sun-like stars to show disk-stripping winds change with age. The survey identifies which force removes planet-building gas at each stage, but it does not yet put the giant-planet deadline in years.
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Webb spectra identified nine new brown dwarfs in the IC 348 nursery, the faintest estimated at about two Jupiter masses, a record low for the class. It is still open whether brown dwarf formation stops there or this survey simply could not see any fainter.
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JWST found water-altered clay minerals on two of Neptune's small inner moons and its rings, with no water ice. The likely source is the shattered interior of a much larger lost moon.
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Saturn's northern hexagon has looked the same for more than 40 years, so a second polygon that only shows up in images from 2023 onward hands atmospheric modellers a formation they can watch happen rather than a finished structure to explain.
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PRIMA, a 1.8-metre far-infrared telescope managed by JPL, moves into preliminary design with a project cost ceiling of $1.2 billion that excludes launch, a 2033 launch target and a confirmation review still ahead.
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University of Maryland astronomers using Webb found ammonia on HATS-6 b and early temperatures near 120 C, against the 425 C usually cited. Their leading suspect is reflective cloud, and the planet's chemistry readings depend on that temperature.
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Webb watched Chariklo, the first small body found to have rings, cross in front of a star in 2022, and the ring opacities it measured do not match the ground-based ones from the previous decade. The paper offers three explanations.
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A team led by Sunmyon Chon ran nested cosmological simulations on Japan's ATERUI III and got black holes growing dozens of times faster than anything can today, with properties the release says resemble Webb's dots.
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University of Chicago astronomers report that HD 3167 b, a super-Earth with a one-day orbit, has a dayside cooler than bare rock should allow. That makes it the coolest atmosphere case so far for a ten-planet program looking for the temperature at which lava worlds start to keep their atmospheres.
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University of Utah astronomers observed 29 massive stars in six dwarf galaxies with Hubble and found winds weaken sharply below a fifth of solar metallicity. None of the stars sits in an early galaxy, so the link to Webb's early galaxies remains an inference.
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A hand search of public JWST spectra turned up three galaxies whose outflowing gas carried carbon, oxygen and silicon 500 million years after the Big Bang. The search was done by eye, so the three cases show that enrichment happened while leaving its frequency open.
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CASPAR, the Notre Dame-led accelerator nearly a mile under South Dakota, has begun firing protons at a fluorine target that took a year and a half to build. The run has not yet produced published numbers.
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NASA pointed the telescope at galaxy cluster MACS J0417 on September 19 to catch a second appearance of supernova Athena, predicted before early March 2027, and the timing would constrain both the cluster's mass and the expansion rate.
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