James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)

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From dead galaxies to mysterious red dots, here's what the James Webb Telescope has found in just 3 years
https://phys.org/news/2024-12-dead-gala ... -dots.html
by Themiya Nanayakkara, Ivo Labbe and Karl Glazebrook, The Conversation

On this day three years ago, we witnessed the nail-biting launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the largest and most powerful telescope humans have ever sent into space.

It took 30 years to build, but in three short years of operation, JWST has already revolutionized our view of the cosmos.

It's explored our own solar system, studied the atmospheres of distant planets in search of signs of life and probed the farthest depths to find the very first stars and galaxies formed in the universe.

Here's what JWST has taught us about the early universe since its launch—and the new mysteries it has uncovered.

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The Most Distant Fully-Formed Spiral Galaxy Known Has Been Spotted By JWST

PUBLISHED
3 days ago

It has been just over three years since JWST was launched into space and in that time, the telescope has dramatically expanded our understanding of the distant universe. Among the important findings is the discovery of very young galaxies that already looked like their more senior counterparts in the local universe, and a recent study has shown a spiral galaxy that already had everything modern ones do just 1.13 billion years after the Big Bang.

The galaxy has been nicknamed Zhúlóng, which means "Torch Dragon". It is a spiral galaxy like our own, the Milky Way. Zhúlóng also shows a clear division between its central concentration of stars, known as the bulge, and the disk where the spiral arms are located. As reported in a yet-to-be peer-reviewed paper, this is the most distant galaxy with a bulge, disk, and spiral arms known to date.

The bulge is believed to form first and for that reason, it has the older stars. Over time, the disk grows and the spiral arms form creating what we recognize and classify as a spiral galaxy. The observations of Zhúlóng show a clear distinction between the bulge and the disk – but that’s not all. The galaxy is also massive, weighing around 100 billion times our Sun (roughly what the Milky Way weighs today) having had over 13 billion years to grow.

With this discovery, JWST demonstrates that the process of formation and evolution of spiral galaxies can happen in as little as a billion years, even though it likely took many other galaxies billions of years to get as big and with a morphology like the more modern spiral galaxies. Zhúlóng is forming stars at an impressive rate, much more prolific than our own galaxy. However, compared to similar massive galaxies at that time, it is pretty quiet.

Galaxies also grow through collisions with small and big galaxies. These mergers were a lot more common back in the past when the universe was denser. Still, it does not seem like the galaxy is undergoing anything like that now. If it had had mergers, the events would have been much quicker than they are today, leading to very efficient growth.

https://www.iflscience.com/the-most-dis ... jwst-77431



Image credit: Xiao et al., arXiv 2024 (CC BY 4.0)

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NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Faces Potential 20% Budget Cut Just 4 years After Launch
by Tariq Malik
February 21, 2025

Introduction:

(Space.com) The scientists behind NASA's largest and most powerful space telescope ever built are bracing for potentially crippling budget cuts, and the observatory is only halfway through its primary mission.

The team overseeing NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been directed to prepare for up to 20% in budget cuts that would touch on every aspect of the flagship observatory's operations, which are managed by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Maryland. The potential cut comes even as the space observatory is more in demand than ever before, with astronomers requesting the equivalent of nine years' worth of Webb observing time in one operational year.

"NASA is having budget constraints across the entire board, so the institute is being asked to consider a significant — about 20% — cut to our operational budget for the mission starting later this year," Tom Brown, who leads the Webb mission office at STScI, told a crowd of scientists last month at the 245th American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in National Harbor, Maryland. "So the impacts of that, if it comes to pass, pretty much cut across the entire mission."

NASA's $25.4 billion budget request for 2025 set aside $317 million to fund the Webb space telescope, as well as the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory that together comprise NASA's currently operational "Great Observatories." The Hubble Telescope program is facing a potential 20% budget cut of its own, according to SpaceNews. And Chandra is facing the end of its mission, with NASA's 2025 budget request including plans to wind down operations, with its budget dropping from $41.1 million this year to just $5.2 million in 2029.

Read more here: https://www.space.com/space-exploratio ... dget-cuts

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James Webb Space Telescope Targets Mysterious, Free-Floating Mass
The strange body could be a rogue planet or a so-called 'failed star.'
By Adrianna Nine March 5, 2025

https://www.extremetech.com/science/jam ... ating-mass
The James Webb Space Telescope is helping scientists study a strange mass about 20 light-years from Earth. Traveling unpredictably through the cosmos, the mass is thought to be either a rogue planet or a "failed star," also known as a brown dwarf. Only a close examination of the body's atmosphere will determine which it is.

Astronomers first found SIMP 0136 back in 2003 using Sondage Infrarouge de Mouvement Propre (SIMP), a French term that translates to "infrared proper motion survey." This technique uses two telescopes on opposite hemispheres to capture the movement of a cosmic body in infrared. Strangely, SIMP 0136 appeared to be traveling freely and without a central star around which it could orbit. It also spun very quickly, despite being roughly the same size as Jupiter, making a single SIMP 0136 day only 2.4 hours on Earth.

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The new, farthest galaxy has been found by JWST, only 280 million years after the Big Bang
https://phys.org/news/2025-05-farthest- ... years.html
by Evan Gough, Universe Today

edited by Lisa Lock, reviewed by Andrew Zinin

The JWST has done it again. The powerful space telescope has already revealed the presence of bright galaxies only several hundred million years after the Big Bang. Now, it's sensed light from a galaxy only 280 million years after the Big Bang, the most distant galaxy ever detected.

Prior to the JWST, we had no infrared telescopes with large enough mirrors to detect light from the early galaxies. The Hubble can see near-infrared light, but only has a 2.4-meter mirror. It found only one galaxy from the universe's 500 million years. The Spitzer Space Telescope was a dedicated infrared telescope, but it only had an 85 cm mirror. Not only does the JWST have a much larger mirror, but detector technology has advanced so much that the veil obscuring the early universe is being lifted one ancient galaxy at a time.

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1.5TB of James Webb Space Telescope data dumped on the internet — new searchable database is the largest window into our universe to date

published 6 hours ago

The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) has just released the “largest look ever into the deep universe.” Even more importantly, it has made the data publicly available and accessible “in an easily searchable format.” Possibly the star attraction from this massive 1.5TB of James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data is the interactive viewer, where you can gawp at stunning space imagery encompassing nearly 800,000 galaxies. At the same site, you can find the complete set of NIRCam and MIRI mosaics and tiles, plus a full photometric catalog.

The COSMOS-Web program is a NASA-backed project with the support of scientists from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). With this significant data release, the public at large is getting access to the largest view deep into the universe they will have ever seen.

According to the press release announcement, the published survey maps 0.54 degrees of the sky, or “about the area of three full moons,” with the NIRCam (near infrared imaging), and a 0.2 square degree area with MIRI (mid-infrared imaging).

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-indus ... se-to-date



COSMOS-Web NIRCam mosaic (upper left) with zoom-ins to the region surrounding the COSMOS-Web Ring (Mercier et al. 2024, Shuntov et al. 2025a)(Image credit: Cosmic Evolution Survey )

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Images of the planets –



Hoch et al., Nature, 2025

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JWST Discovers Additional Moon of Uranus
By David Dickinson
August 21, 2025

Introduction:

(Sky & Telescope) Chalk up one more tiny moon for the ice giant Uranus. On August 19th, researchers announced the discovery of the small new moon, provisionally dubbed S/2025 U1. The Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams also announced the discovery on the same day. The discovery brings the number of confirmed moons for Uranus to 29.

The researchers used images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope on February 2nd of this year for the discovery, combining ten 40-minute exposures from the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCAM). The moon can be seen in the sequence of discovery exposures as a +25th-magnitude object.

Assuming the moon’s albedo (surface reflectivity) is similar to that of other known Uranian satellites, S/2025 U1 has a mean diameter of 10 kilometers (6 miles), about the size of Mars’s misshapen moon Deimos. That would make it one of the smallest known moons of Uranus.

“It’s a small moon but a significant discovery, which is something that even NASA’s Voyager spacecraft didn’t see during its flyby nearly 40 years ago,” says team leader Maryame El Moutamid (Southwest Research Institute) in a recent press release.

Conclusion:

It’s remarkable that JWST can now see moons that Voyager 2 missed in the '80s. We can only hope to see the moons of Uranus up close again if the proposed Uranus Orbiter — recommended in the 2023-2032 Planetary Science Decadal Survey — makes its way to space in the coming decade. For now, we’ll have to marvel at JWST’s amazing views and the addition of one more tiny world to the drama of our solar system.

Read more here: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy- ... f-uran us

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Demand for JWST's Observational Time Hits a New Peak
by Andy Tomaswick
November 14, 2025

Introduction:

(Universe Today) Getting time on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the dream of many astronomers. The most powerful space telescope currently in our arsenal, the JWST has been in operation for almost four years at this point, after a long and tumultuous development time. Now, going into its fifth year of operation, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the organization that operates the science and mission operations centers for the JWST has received its highest number ever of submission for observational programs. Now a team of volunteer judges and the institute's scientists just have to pick which ones will actually get telescope time.

STScI received 2,900 individual proposals for observations for its fifth observing year. That’s up from a total of 2,377 last year, and is the highest on record, which has been increasing every year since the first cycle, which had only 1,173 proposals. As astronomers become more familiar with JWST’s capabilities, they seem to come up with even more ideas about how to use it.

It isn’t just astronomers that have submitted proposals in prior years either. According to a press release from STScI, the number of unique scientists that took the lead on submitted proposals this year grew by 17%, showcasing how new entrants are becoming involved in JWST’s ongoing exploration program.

Part of that might be due to some of the new features of this observational round. This year STScI introduced the Long-Term Monitoring Initiative, which allows for longer observational studies over multiple observing cycles - so a scientist could ask for some time in several of the next upcoming rounds of observations, including into JWST’s expected “extended life”. In fact, this observational cycle is due to mark the end of the “minimum” designed life of the JWST, though engineers currently expect that, due to an unexpectedly low fuel consumption getting to its L2 orbital point, the telescope could be in operation for 20 years or more.

Even with that extended life, it seems unlikely to be able to support all of the proposals flooding into it on a daily basis.

Read more here: https://www.universetoday.com/articles ... -new-peak

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NASA Webb Pushes Boundaries of Observable Universe Closer to Big Bang

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/ ... -big-bang/

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JWST discovers a new extremely metal-poor dwarf galaxy

https://phys.org/news/2026-02-jwst-extr ... dwarf.html

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New Map of the Cosmic Web is the Most Detailed Ever
May 14, 2026

Introduction:

(Futurity) The work traces the network of galaxies all the way back to when the universe was one billion years old.

The cosmic web is the universe’s vast, skeleton-like framework—a network of interwoven filaments and sheets of dark matter and gas that surround immense, nearly empty voids. It forms the underlying architecture of the cosmos, linking galaxies and clusters into a single, intricate, and far-reaching structure.

The study in The Astrophysical Journal used the largest James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) survey conducted so far—the COSMOS-Web—to trace how galaxies form a network across 13.7 billion years of cosmic history.

Since its launch in 2021, JWST has transformed astronomy with its extraordinary sensitivity and sharpness. Its infrared instruments pick up faint, distant galaxies that were invisible to earlier observatories, allowing scientists to see further back in time than ever before, and through cosmic dust.

To harness this power, an international team designed COSMOS-Web, the largest General Observer (GO) program selected for JWST. The GO program is the primary way astronomers gain access to the telescope for their research. Covering a contiguous area of the sky about the size of three full Moons, the survey was designed to map the cosmic web.

Read more here: https://www.futurity.org/cosmic-web-ma ... -3334032

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