After using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to peer back toward the beginning of time, astronomers have proposed a radical new explanation for one of the universe's most flummoxing phenomena.

Little red dots (LRDs) are mysteriously compact, brilliant celestial objects found predominantly when the universe was less than 10% of its current age.

As revealed by JWST's unmatched infrared sensitivity, LRDs emerged incredibly early, only around 600 million years after the Big Bang, and then began disappearing about a billion years later.

Now, in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers have proposed a novel formation mechanism for LRDs: They may be birthed by previously undiscovered celestial companions, whose intense ultraviolet (UV) radiation causes gas clouds to collapse into incredibly dense and exotic objects, like "black hole stars."

"The most surprising aspect… is that these little red dots are not just 'red dots,' but there is a more complex emission nearby and around them," Josephine Baggen, an astronomer at Yale University and first author of the study, told Live Science in an email. "We think those what we call 'companions' are starlight."

Connecting the dots

In the study, the researchers compiled a sample of 83 LRDs, imaged with JWST, from ultradeep surveys. They found that 36 of the 83 LRDs, including over 80% of the brightest ones, hosted at least one companion that shined bright in blue-ish ultraviolet light; little red dots with little blue companions.

These companions had masses ranging from hundreds of millions to billions that of the sun, suggesting that they may be star clusters or relatively small early galaxies, Baggen told Live Science.

These UV-spewing companions spurred the formation of LRDs from immense gas clouds, the team's new proposal states. Normally, cold molecular gas clouds fragment and condense into stars. But the intense UV irradiation from the companions halted the fragmentation process, potentially squeezing the gas clouds into supermassive stars that directly collapsed into black holes while skipping the explosive supernova stage that normally marks these stars' deaths.

This proposal helps to explain why LRDs appear bright in red optical light and UV wavelengths, with a dip between the two caused by the wavelengths of light absorbed by hydrogen gas. Rather than originating from a single object, the optical red light derives from the LRD, the UV light comes from its nearby companion, and the dip is thought to be caused by the dense cocoon of gas around the LRD.

As a result, the researchers suggested that all LRDs may have such partners but they may be too close together to be distinguished. Conversely, some companions may be separated by greater distances than the researchers accounted for in this study, requiring future observations to zoom out.

Galactic potential?

Intriguingly, this work may illuminate a couple of early-universe enigmas. First, the black holes manifesting from these interactions may be between 100,000 and 1 million solar masses, forming the "seeds" necessary to explain how ancient supermassive black holes grew so surprisingly massive so early in cosmic history.

Additionally, because LRDs may merge with the relatively small, UV-spewing galaxies that birthed them, this process may have created the impressively immense galaxies all around us today.

"We do think that this might be the birth of the supermassive black holes around these UV companions, born 'outside the galaxy,' [which] will eventually merge," Baggen told Live Science. "Whether this is what happened to the Milky Way in its earliest phases, we cannot really say, but it is plausible! There is still a lot of debate about how LRDs evolve and what they turn into at later times."

This image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) offers a rare look at the hidden workings of Centaurus A, one of the most unusual and active galaxies relatively near Earth. JWST detected wavelengths of light humans cannot see, revealing a galaxy shaped by violence and chaos.

Centaurus A is relatively close to the Milky Way, which enabled JWST to study the strange galaxy in remarkable detail. It's no quiet, ordinary galaxy; it's the aftermath of a major cosmic collision. At its heart is an actively feeding supermassive black hole, surrounded by vast clouds of dust that trace the galaxy's turbulent history.

In visible light — such as images from the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory and Very Large Telescope in Chile — thick dust lanes obscure Centaurus A's center, blocking part of the story. The Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, both of which can see in near-infrared wavelengths, previously imaged Centaurus A, but they also saw mainly dust. But infrared light can pass through that dust, which enabled JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument to see the galaxy's center glowing in white and pale pink, revealing filaments, loops and clouds of warm dust stretching across the scene.

Scientists believe Centaurus A collided with another galaxy roughly 2 billion years ago. That ancient merger left visible scars, which JWST captured in striking detail. Evidence of a galaxy pulled, stirred and reshaped over immense timescales appears throughout the image, from the warped gray-and-white parallelogram-shaped structure cutting across the galaxy, to the pink and lavender ribbons curving above and below it in an S shape. The image reveals how galaxy mergers rearrange dust and gas, trigger star formation and influence galaxy growth over time.

The image also shows how a nearby supermassive black hole can both fuel and limit the birth of stars. As material falls toward the black hole at the center of Centaurus A, it releases enormous energy and launches powerful jets that shape the surrounding gas and dust.

The image comes near the end of JWST's fourth year of science operations, which began with the release of spectacular images in July 2022. The telescope launched on Dec. 25, 2021, and is predicted to operate for about 20 years.

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Astronomers have reconstructed the "skeleton" of the cosmos in unprecedented detail, thanks to the largest-ever survey conducted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The resulting map reveals how galaxies have evolved since the universe's infancy around 13 billion years ago and how they fall together in a vast structure called the cosmic web.

The cosmic web is the largest known structure in existence, home to countless galaxy clusters and clusters of clusters. It is the framework of the universe, a scaffolding of gas filaments, stars, voids and sheets of dark matter that trace the entire large-scale organization of the cosmos.

In a paper published May 6 in The Astrophysical Journal, an international team of astronomers, led by researchers from the University of California, Riverside (UCR), utilized a treasure trove of JWST data to reveal how the universe has evolved.

How to sculpt a universe from scratch

The new research shows how intrinsic and extrinsic factors influence the formation and death of stars — and, therefore, galaxies and galactic clusters — throughout vast swathes of cosmic time.

Yet in what may seem like a wistful twist, the peak era of star formation is many billions of years behind us. The new research offers additional evidence of how the universe's structural framework facilitated this transition.

"We show how the cosmic web helped shape galaxy growth before, during, and after that peak era," study co-author and UCR astronomer Hossein Hatamnia told Live Science via email. "At earlier times, dense regions appear to be sites of rapid galaxy growth, while at later times dense environments are associated with the shutdown of star formation."

Such revelations come courtesy of COSMOS-Web, the grandest JWST survey yet: a 255-hour program spanning a contiguous area of the sky about the size of three full moons.

Compared with the previous COSMOS2020 survey, shared in 2021 and conducted by the Hubble Space Telescope and other facilities, the JWST-derived COSMOS-Web boasts better redshift precision and includes more galaxies — including fainter, lower-mass and more-distant objects. (Redshift is a measure of cosmic distance and time based on how light shifts to redder wavelengths as it crosses the universe.)

Compared with the JWST-derived image below, which shows a slice of the cosmos as it appeared 11.5 billion years ago, previous cosmic maps were sparser, more diffuse, and lacking in cosmic structures.

Additionally, the older COSMOS2020 survey tended to overestimate the depth in especially dense cosmic regions, where galaxies grow earlier and larger, and underestimate the depth of the least-dense spatial regions, the researchers said.

Revealing celestial birth and death

Yet JWST's cosmic map preserves the relative contrast across cosmic regions. It also shows that "massive galaxies in dense environments are more likely to be quiescent" — dying and quenched of their star-forming potential.

This may be because those galaxies are too massive, the team theorized. Once the dark matter halos that anchor galaxies grow to 1 trillion solar masses, they energize gas and prevent it from forming new stars. Additionally, active supermassive black holes quench star formation by energizing gas with their lethal, near-light-speed jets.

Such "mass-related" star-killing mechanisms dominated up to around 7 billion years ago — around half the age of the universe, the team found.

In the more recent universe, star formation is dominantly quenched by the environment around galaxies, which may strip them of material or prevent cold gas from accumulating and coalescing into stars.

Thanks to JWST's capabilities, the large-scale structure and evolution of the universe have been made clearer than ever, resolving blurry blobs into dim, ancient galaxies.

"The jump in depth and resolution is truly significant, and we can now see the cosmic web at a time when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, an era that was essentially out of reach before JWST," co-author Bahram Mobasher, a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at UCR, concluded in a statement.

The catalog of 164,000 galaxies used to build the map of the cosmic web is publicly available.

This article was first published May 18, 2026.

Astronomers have spotted an ancient galaxy shining through the cosmic fog of the early universe, revealing a detailed view that was thought to be impossible.

Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, along with data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT), researchers detected "ionizing" ultraviolet photons — energetic light capable of stripping electrons from hydrogen atoms — coming from the galaxy, called MXDFz4.4. It's the earliest such detection on record, arriving only around 250 million years after the end of a major cosmic transition called the Epoch of Reionization, the researchers explained in a study published June 23 in The Astrophysical Journal.

For hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, the space between galaxies was filled with a fog of neutral hydrogen gas that blocked this kind of light. Over time, radiation from the first stars and galaxies ionized that gas, clearing the fog and letting light travel freely across the universe — a process astronomers are still working to fully understand.

"This was thought to be impossible," Ilias Goovaerts, a postdoctoral fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore and first author of the new study, said to Live Science. "What’s really special about this galaxy is that it’s getting through so much of the intergalactic medium [the ionized plasma between galaxies]. It’s the furthest away so it has the most intergalactic medium to get through."

What makes MXDFz4.4 unusual is its combination of size and star-formation rate. The galaxy is roughly 100 times smaller by area than the Milky Way, yet it forms stars around 10 times faster, packing a large number of massive young stars into a compact space. According to Goovaerts, that crowding effect helps the galaxy punch clear channels through its surrounding gas, letting ionizing light escape both the galaxy and, eventually, the murky space between galaxies. The team estimates that somewhere between half and all of the galaxy's ionizing light is escaping.

The discovery, made in October, came about somewhat by chance. While preparing an unrelated funding proposal just days before a major deadline, Goovaerts examined an existing, deep Hubble image to check whether anyone had looked for this kind of signal there before. Within a couple of hours, he had a promising signal. "It was very, very quick from us having the idea to me going, okay, there’s something here and this is exciting," Goovaerts said. "We were excited from day one, but then it took months for it to mature and to extract all the properties about the galaxy."

The finding relied on an unusually rich set of observations: an extremely deep Hubble image taken from 40 hours of observations; JWST imaging across many wavelengths, used to characterize the galaxy's stars and star-formation history; and one of the deepest spectra ever taken of a single patch of sky, gathered over roughly six days of observing time with the VLT's Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer instrument. That spectrum confirmed the galaxy's distance through its Lyman-alpha emission line — which serves as a "hydrogen fingerprint," or a glow given off by excited hydrogen gas, that astronomers can use to measure cosmic distance and time.

No other galaxy from this early period had previously shown detectable ionizing light, making MXDFz4.4 one of a kind so far, study co-author Marc Rafelski, deputy mission head for the Hubble Space Telescope at STScI, noted in the statement. .

Researchers say bursts of vigorous star formation like the one seen in MXDFz4.4 may have played an important role in clearing the early universe's hydrogen fog and that more galaxies like it are likely still waiting to be found.

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When galaxies collide, it's less like a train wreck and more like a marriage: Two separate entities merge into a single massive celestial structure. But relationships are hard, whether you're a human or a galaxy — and this process may also "kill" the merging galaxies by unleashing star-quenching winds.

This mechanism may help to explain an enigma in the early universe. A glut of James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations have shown that galaxies grew surprisingly massive within 1 billion years of the Big Bang. Just as unexpectedly, many of these galaxies appear to have already stopped producing stars and grown quiescent (or dead) only about a billion years later.

Galactic winds have previously been considered as galaxy-killing culprits, but astronomers lacked the direct evidence to confirm that this process can meaningfully suppress star formation at such an early stage of cosmic history. Now, in a paper published June 10 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, an international team of astronomers has described how star-driven winds can quench galaxies, creating the kaleidoscope of quiescent structures observed by JWST.

Gas leak near the dawn of time

The researchers used JWST and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array radio telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert to observe a system of galaxies called CRISTAL-02 as it appeared only 1 billion years after the Big Bang.

With a stellar mass around 10 billion times greater than the sun's, CRISTAL-02 is a galactic merger that represents the latter stages of a multigalaxy collision. It also exhibits an immense plume of gas, almost as long as the galaxy system itself, that is escaping into space at hundreds of miles per second.

This immense outflow, comprising 1.5 billion solar masses, appears to be driven by the intense winds generated through a rapid burst of star formation, as well as star death, the study authors said. Both processes occur as galaxies collide, shocking large gas clouds into birthing new stars, including extremely massive ones that die within a few million years in violent supernova explosions.

The intense radioactive winds released from these young stars and their dying elder siblings can then suppress stellar formation, by energizing and dispersing pockets of cool molecular gas before it can gravitationally collapse to birth baby stars.

"The galaxy has a powerful wind that is ejecting material twice as fast as the galaxy forms stars," first author Rebecca Davies, an astrophysicist at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, said in a statement.

The CRISTAL-02 galaxy system may be forming around 260 new solar-mass stars per year — a rate three times higher than galaxies with similar masses and ages. Yet it's also losing more than 500 solar masses per year, — 20 times faster than typical massive galaxies, the researchers found.

"We don’t know much about how the first galaxies stopped forming stars. This work directly shows that process in action," co-author Andreas Faisst, an observational astronomer at Caltech, told Live Science via email.

"If the outflow keeps going, the galaxy will run out of gas to form stars in less than 100 million years from now — a blink of an eye in astrophysical terms."

A widespread cosmic phenomenon

This research offers a blueprint for galactic senescence, or gradual deterioration. "Almost half of early massive galaxies are interacting with other nearby galaxies, suggesting this isn't a quirk but a widespread cosmic phenomenon," Davies added.

But previous simulations have suggested that outflows from active black holes, rather than stars, may be primarily responsible for creating quiescent galaxies. Star-burst-driven outflows cease once star formation stops, whereas black-hole-driven outflows can persist for hundreds of millions of years afterward.

Therefore, the researchers cannot rule out that the CRISTAL-02 outflow was generated by a powerful black hole that was inactive at the time of the observation.

Additionally, the researchers compared the outflow from CRISTAL-02 with a sample of 99 other similar outflows spanning 12 billion years to determine whether this feedback process evolves over time.

They discovered that outflow efficiency has remained roughly constant across cosmic history, even as the internal properties of galaxies have changed while the universe has aged and expanded. Additionally, constraining the early-universe feedback mechanisms that dictate galactic evolution can help astronomers improve cosmological simulations that aim to explain why the cosmos looks and behaves the way it does today.

"If many early galaxies collide and experience rapid growth, then it may not be surprising that we see so many dead galaxies in the early universe," Davies explained. "CRISTAL-02 offers a natural solution to the mystery of why these massive galaxies live fast and die young."

These processes are still at work today, governing local star-dense sectors in our galaxy. They may also dictate its far off future, as the Milky Way could collide with our biggest neighbor, Andromeda, in around 4.5 billion years. When this merger occurs, it "will likely trigger a starburst associated with strong stellar winds — maybe similar to what we see in CRISTAL-02," Faisst said via email.

"The Milky Way and Andromeda system will subsequently likely become a large quiescent elliptical galaxy."

Explosive beams of energy crisscross through rainbow-colored space in a scene that evokes a cinematic sci-fi battle. In reality, it’s a scene of birth; in this single image, astronomers have captured every stage of star formation playing out at once.

This new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) image reveals OMC-2, a beautiful and dense star-forming region within the Orion Molecular Cloud. It places viewers inside a turbulent cosmic nursery, where gas, dust and newborn stars are all in motion.

Just south of the famous Orion Nebula, one of the best-known stellar nurseries in the night sky (located within the three-star asterism known as the Sword of Orion), OMC-2 is a cloud of cold gas and dust where protostars — very young stars still gathering mass — are forming.

The scene is filled with layered clouds of gas and dust glowing in blue, green and yellow. Thick clumps of cold dust appear dark brown to black, blocking light completely and creating dark pockets across the field. Inside some of these clumps, stars may still be forming, hidden from view inside thick cosmic cocoons.

Scattered throughout the clouds are fully-formed stars of different colors and sizes, from small orange points to larger white and blue stars shining through the haze.

But perhaps the most striking feature of the image is the network of pale, glowing streams and wave-like structures cutting through the cloud. These are created by protostar jets as they collide with the surrounding material, carving out bright ridges and shock fronts. The result is an image that looks sculpted, with curved streams of whitish gas marking how young stars shape their environment.

Each jet, ridge and shadow provides clues about the movement of material through the region and helps astronomers trace how stars form and how their energy changes the surrounding cloud. Its colors and textures reveal a complex environment where gravity pulls material together, young stars ignite and energetic outflows reshape the cloud that gave rise to them.

It’s a vivid portrait of cosmic creation made possible by JWST’s infrared vision, which allows it to peer through thick layers of gas and dust that block visible light. By detecting that infrared light, astronomers can see structures and embryonic stars that would otherwise remain secret.

OMC-2 is one of four parts of the Orion Molecular Cloud, a massive filament behind the Orion Nebula. OMC-1 sits immediately behind the nebula, OMC-2 and OMC-3 are to its north and OMC-4 lies to its south.

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The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted the most distant, dormant black hole in the known universe , hiding in a galaxy more than 10 billion light-years from Earth.

The newly analyzed black hole, located in a galaxy called MRG-M0138, smashes the previous distance record for such an object by 15 times, according to a study published Thursday (June 4) in the journal Science.

Studying black holes like this, which formed early in the universe's 13.8-billion-year-old history, will give researchers an unprecedented look at how black holes evolved when the universe was young. Within MRG-M0138, for example, scientists suspect there used to be a quasar (an extremely bright and supermassive black hole) that grew very quickly, eventually throwing out a significant amount of gas in the galaxy needed to form new stars. This process rapidly shut down star formation in the galaxy, robbing the black hole of its fuel source and likely explaining why the area looks so quiet today.

When stars go stagnant

Scientists are curious about how quickly star formation ceases in ancient galaxies such as this one. Luckily, MRG-M0138 is just part of a larger dataset of early-universe galaxies gathered from James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations; the research team also examined four other distant, gravitationally lensed galaxies with the telescope this last year, and analysis is ongoing.

"While the stars in MRG-M0138 are ancient, star formation shut down much later in the other galaxies that we've just observed with JWST," lead author Andrew Newman, a staff scientist at Carnegie Science in California, told Live Science in an email.

"They're like cinders that we can study to learn what put out the fire," Newman continued, then alluded to a direction of future research. "In particular, we're looking for signs of gas that's been blown out of the galaxy, by a black hole more active than the one in MRG-M0138."

Aside from the star-formation sequence at MRG-M0138, the researchers also determined the mass of its black hole — which is roughly six billion times that of the sun.

Making this measurement wasn't easy; because MRG-M0138's black hole is dormant and not interacting with any gas around it, it's invisible in all wavelengths of light. Weighing the cosmic monster required repurposing a technique using star motions, usually used in galaxies much closer to Earth. To track the motion of stars orbiting the black hole, the team relied on a natural magnifying glass, called gravitational lensing.

Researchers took advantage of another galaxy, between MRG-M0138 and Earth, whose gravity is so powerful that it bent the light of objects behind it, magnifying groups of stars. This lens made the image of MRG-M0138 about 30 times larger than what would usually be visible, allowing the researchers to track the stars whirling about the black hole. The team then analyzed the stars' motions to determine how quickly they moved, as well as any differences in motion between stars that were closer or further from the black hole, to figure out the black hole's mass.

"By demonstrating the feasibility of such a technique for galaxies in the early universe, we can now undertake a more complete census of how black holes develop over time, and infer their role in shaping galaxy evolution," senior author Richard Ellis, an astrophysics professor at University College London, said in a statement.

That said, other techniques will be needed to gather that census of black holes because JWST is designed to take a very detailed look at a small patch of sky. To push the research forward, the team is hoping for lensed-galaxy observations from the wide-angle Euclid space telescope — as well as the forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is also optimized to look at large swaths of the sky.

"We want to find more galaxies like these: places where star formation shut down in the early universe, and that are magnified by a gravitational lens," Newman told Live Science. "We need sensitive infrared images of large areas of sky to find these rare objects, and fortunately that is exactly what the Euclid telescope is providing and the Roman Space Telescope, scheduled for launch later this year, will soon deliver."

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One of the greatest achievements of the James Webb Space Telescope is how it has allowed scientists to push the boundaries of astronomy by observing galaxies that existed during the early universe, less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang. This period, known as the Epoch of Reionization, coincides with what astronomers have nicknamed the "Cosmic Dark Ages." During this time, 380,000 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with neutral hydrogen, and any sources of light visible today are redshifted beyond the limits of conventional telescopes.

Thanks to Webb's advanced infrared instruments and spectrometers, scientists can now peer behind this veil and see how galaxies have evolved since the earliest cosmological epochs. In a recent discovery, an international team of astronomers used Webb and the gravitational lensing technique to capture a rare look at LAP1-B, an ultra-faint galaxy that existed 800 million years after the Big Bang. Using Webb's spectrometers, the team was able to definitively characterize this galaxy, revealing it to be the most metal-poor galaxy in the early Universe observed to date.

The team was led by Associate Professor Kimihiko Nakajima of Kanazawa University. The study describing their research appeared on May 13th in the journal Nature.

In the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, the universe contained only light elements such as hydrogen and helium, while the elements necessary for life (carbon, oxygen, etc.) were absent. These elements were forged in the interiors of the first generation of stars (Population III), which were then dispersed when these stars went supernova and blew off their external layers. For decades, astronomers have been hoping to find these stars so they could witness the moment they began seeding the Universe with heavier elements. This has been problematic since the earliest galaxies that hosted Population III stars appear so small and faint.

As a result, determining their chemical makeup through spectroscopy was thought to be nearly impossible until now. The work of Nakajima builds on initial detections of LAP1-B by adding JWST spectra to the picture, revealing a record-low oxygen abundance (1/240th that of the sun). When combined with an elevated carbon-to-oxygen ratio and a dominant dark matter halo, these findings suggest that LAP1-B is a progenitor to the fossil galaxies found near the Milky Way. Astronomers have been searching for these "ancestor" galaxies, making LAP1-B a historic window into the earliest stages of galaxy formation.

The team was assisted by the presence of an intervening galaxy cluster, which acted as a gravitational lens, magnifying the light from LAP1-B by a factor of 100. After 30 hours of observations and deep spectroscopy, the team was finally able to characterize the chemical abundance of this galaxy. In addition to being chemically primitive, the galaxy's carbon-to-oxygen ratio closely matches theoretical predictions for the material dispersed by Population III star explosions.

Said Associate Professor Nakajima in a Kanazawa University press release: "I was instantly thrilled by the extreme lack of oxygen revealed in the data. Finding a galaxy in such a primitive state is astonishing. It's a chemical signature that clearly indicates a primordial galaxy caught in the moments shortly after its formation.."

The team also discovered that LAP1-B is incredibly light (less than 3,300 Solar masses), implying that most of the galaxy consists of dark matter in the form of a halo.

Along with its unique chemical makeup, this makes it a near-perfect match for the "Ultra-Faint Dwarf galaxies (UFDs)" found near the Milky Way today. Said Professor Masami Ouchi (NAOJ/University of Tokyo), a member of the research team: "UFDs are not only the faintest galaxies; they are composed of ancient stars over 12 billion years old and are often described as 'fossils of the universe.' Astronomers suspected they might be the remains of the universe's earliest galaxies because they lack heavy elements, but astronomers never had a direct link — until we found LAP1-B. It is a profound surprise to find that LAP1-B looks exactly like the 'ancestor' we had only imagined in theories. This helps us solve the mystery of why these cosmic fossils have survived in their current form to the present day."

The team's findings present astronomers with a new way to map the birth of heavier elements in the Universe and the formation of its oldest structures. The next step will consist of the team using JWST data to search for even more chemically primitive objects, including the very first ever formed.

As Nakajima indicated: "We hope this discovery marks a historic step in understanding how the elements that make up our own bodies were first born and accumulated across the Universe."​​ ​

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A mysterious new kind of celestial object discovered by the James Webb telescope just inched closer to reality, a new study reports.

Looking within a large stellar nursery in the southern sky, astronomers found two pairs of "rogue" Jupiter-like objects that are similar to mysteriously paired planets that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) previously discovered. The planet pairs — which tumble through space, seemingly untethered to any star — dwell in a different part of the Milky Way than JWST's initial discoveries, suggesting that the enigmatic objects truly are a new kind of object. However, further observations are still necessary for confirmation.

"We were always fascinated by the possibility of finding different kinds of planets," Dante Minniti, a professor of astrophysics at the Universidad Andrés Bello University in Chile and co-author of the new research, told Live Science in an email.

Free-floating planets (FFPs) are "rogue" exoplanets that aren't gravitationally bound to a star. These peculiar objects abound in the cosmos. Surveys by space-based telescopes, especially JWST, have revealed hundreds of FFPs in many star-forming regions, or nebulas. NASA estimates that solitary rogue planets may outnumber stars in the Milky Way 20 to 1.

In contrast, binary FFPs — which comprise two rogue exoplanets that orbit each other — seem much rarer. One subset, in particular, has piqued interest. Called Jupiter-mass binary objects, or "JuMBOs," these binary pairs of widely separated planet-like objects measure 0.7 to 30 times Jupiter's mass.

A jumbo-size mystery

In 2023, JWST unveiled 40-odd JuMBO candidates in the Orion Nebula, a stellar nursery in the constellation Orion. Their discovery raised interest because such planet pairs challenged conventional theories of planet formation. Subsequent research, though, disputed their existence, including a 2024 reanalysis that suggested many of the purported planet pairs were actually just distant stars.

Still, these developments didn't dissuade Minniti from searching for more definitive pairs of exoplanets and low-mass cosmic objects. Also on his search list were brown dwarfs, "failed stars" that are more massive than planets but not big enough to be stably powered by nuclear fusion.

However, rather than scouring the Orion Nebula again, Minniti and his collaborators turned to a different stellar nursery: the Lower Centaurus-Crux (LCC) association, which "spreads hundreds of square degrees across the Southern sky," he said.

It consists of more than 100 young, massive blue stars that move together through space but are not linked by gravity. Objects in the LCC association are, on average, about 15 million years old, said Claudio Cáceres, an associate professor of physical sciences at Andrés Bello University and first author of the new study. Exoplanets this age are still considered young, and at longer wavelengths, "they are more luminous than their older counterparts," he wrote in an email to Live Science.

A new type of object?

First, Cáceres and his collaborators created an enormous database of images of the LCC association by crossmatching two datasets. One comprised archival near-infrared photographs by the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Piranal Observatory in Chile. The second dataset consisted of visible-light snapshots gathered by the European Space Agency's Gaia survey.

The researchers searched the data for faint cosmic objects that might be planets. Of the 9,000-odd low-mass candidates they identified, only about 400 actually belonged to the LCC association, since they showed movement patterns that were mathematically predicted. Minniti said the team then "inspected the candidates one by one carefully in order to find faint companions that could be characterized."

Their analysis, described in a study published April 24 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, revealed 17 object binaries. Only two — named VVVX-FFP-001 and VVVX-FFP-007 — are pairs of planet-size objects, and they share several characteristics with JuMBOs.

Both contain two objects, each of which has a mass less than 13 times Jupiter's — approximately 12 and eight times Jupiter's mass for VVVX-FFP-001 and VVVX-FFP-007, respectively. Additionally, both are widely separated; three and 180 times the distance between the sun and Neptune separate VVVX-FFP-001's and VVVX-FFP-007's members, respectively.

Despite these similarities, Cáceres doesn't call the newly discovered objects JuMBOs, noting that the term hasn't been accepted in the research literature. "I personally prefer free-floating planetary-mass binaries," he said.

While the new objects support the existence of JuMBOs, they also suggest that FFP pairs are rare, accounting for just 2% of rogue planets in the LCC association, Cáceres said. Although much smaller than the Orion Nebula JuMBO fraction of 9%, this value agrees with the fraction of paired "cold" objects like brown dwarfs found elsewhere. This suggests the Orion Nebula sample may indeed have falsely identified members.

Additionally, Minniti said, some FFP pairs may be "tight binaries" that orbit each other at narrow separations. He said such planets may retain liquid water because their companions' gravitational tugs heat them up. This could make them habitable, Cáceres said, "even when there is no star. … This is very interesting because these binary planets may transport life through different regions of the Galaxy."

The researchers plan to continue studying the objects using instruments like the ESO's Very Large Telescope. "These observations will help to better characterize the whole sample of low-mass binary objects," Minniti said.

Astronomers have found the most extreme example yet of a black hole outweighing its own galaxy, and it may be hiding clues to how the supermassive black holes seen today formed in the early universe.

In a new study, astronomers directly measured the mass of a black hole sitting in a "little red dot" seen when the universe was just 700 million years old. The results suggest that the black hole is much too massive for its host galaxy ‪—‬ meaning it may have formed before the galaxy itself had a chance to develop.

Little red dots (LRDs) are a mysterious class of objects detected in the early universe. The LRD in question, Abell2744-QSO1 (or just "QSO1"), was discovered in James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images in 2023. It was compact and strongly lensed — appearing three times in the image as its light was warped by powerful gravitational effects — and showed telltale signs of an actively feeding black hole at its center. Indirect estimates of the black hole's mass, based on the spectral properties, relied on assumptions calibrated in the local universe and have been heavily debated. Some researchers argue that little red dots are so puzzling that standard assumptions from the local universe cannot explain them, and that exotic phenomena may be at play.

In the new study, published May 27 in the journal Nature, astronomers took a more direct approach and mapped how fast gas rotates at different distances from the center to estimate the black hole's mass. The findings suggest that the methods astronomers use to study black holes in the nearby universe may work just as well for these little red dots.

"This measurement is the first of its type in a Little Red Dot, at least for now," Ignas Juodžbalis, a doctoral candidate at the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge and first author of the study, told Live Science in an email.

When the "stars" aligned

Earlier indirect estimates had placed black hole QSO1’s mass at around 40 million solar masses ‪—‬ remarkably high for such a compact, young system. The larger and more isolated the black hole is relative to its surroundings, the bigger its sphere of influence ‪—‬ the region where its gravity dominates over the stars, gas and dark matter around it. A high-mass black hole, therefore, makes it easier to detect its gravitational influence in the motions of nearby gas.

Adding to this, the galaxy cluster Abell 2744 — located between us and QSO1 — is so massive that its gravity acts as a magnifying glass. Through this effect, known as gravitational lensing, astronomers can see QSO1 brightening by a factor of six and stretching it spatially by a factor of 3.5.

Overall, these conditions were favorable to make the kind of measurement the researchers were aiming for.

The measurement technique relied on the principle that gas orbiting a black hole moves faster the closer it gets to it. By mapping how fast gas moves at different distances from the center of QSO1, the team could work backward to calculate the mass of whatever sat at the center.

The team used JWST's Near-Infrared Spectrograph to extract maps of hydrogen emission line gas, tracking which parts of QSO1 were moving toward us and which were moving away. But the object was so small and distant that the rotation signal in the inner regions fell below what JWST could directly resolve.

So they used spectroastrometry, a technique that measures tiny positional shifts in the light emitted by glowing gas across different wavelengths. This method can recover spatial information far below the telescope's nominal resolution. "This way, we were able to reconstruct the rotation curve below the instrumental resolution of JWST," Juodžbalis explained.

Not too exotic

The results were then fitted with different mass models. A point mass, where all the mass is concentrated at a single location as in a black hole, fit the data well, while a compact yet extended mass distribution, such as a tightly packed cluster of stars matched it poorly. As an independent check, co-author Cosimo Marconcini, a doctoral candidate in astronomy and physics at the University of Florence, ran the full dataset through a 3D framework he developed that models both the movement of the gas and instrumental effects of the telescope, and arrived at the same result. Juodžbalis said the independent confirmation was what gave the result its weight.

Analysis showed that the observations are best explained by a a black hole of around 50 million solar masses. The team is "reasonably confident" that this is indeed a black hole rather than other alternatives. If you were to try to explain their results with a star cluster with a solid edge, Juodžbalis said, it would be far more exotic and difficult to justify than a black hole.

Interestingly, the new measurement lined up closely with the earlier indirect estimate. Juodžbalis cautioned that a single object does not represent an entire population. However, the result suggests the standard indirect black hole mass measurements developed for the local universe may work for little red dots, too. "There may be no need to invoke anything too exotic to explain the properties of Little Red Dots," he said.

"Naked" black hole

The team placed an upper limit on the mass of the stars in the host galaxy at around 20 million solar masses. This means the black hole significantly outweighs its entire host galaxy. Astronomers call such objects "naked" black holes, and QSO1 appears to be the most massive of this kind ever found.

With its massive black hole and its near-absent host galaxy, QSO1 appears to be a massive black hole seed caught in the very first stages of growth, before its galaxy had a chance to develop around it. This finding challenges the standard picture in which black holes grow together with their galaxy over billions of years.

The team considered two exotic origin scenarios for this black hole: direct collapse black holes, which form when massive clouds of pristine gas collapse straight into a black hole without forming stars first, and primordial black holes, which would have formed in the first second after the Big Bang.

"Both scenarios are exotic, and the current data and theory are not quite able to distinguish them," Juodžbalis said.

The team plans to use upcoming ground-based observations to probe the black holes within similar objects that have been found in the local universe.

See how much you know about black holes with our black hole quiz!

One of Neptune's largest moons has stuck around the neighborhood much longer than scientists previously thought — in fact, it may be the sole survivor of the planet's earliest days.

Nereid, Neptune's third-largest moon, is probably the only moon left over from when the ice giant formed early in the solar system's 4.5 billion-year history, a new analysis of James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data suggests.

The results, published Wednesday (May 20) in the journal Science Advances, contradict the previous story about Nereid's history told in the decades since its 1949 discovery: that Neptune "captured" the 220-mile-wide (350 kilometers ) moon from an icy well of bodies in the outer solar system known as the Kuiper Belt.

JWST's observations were key to this realization, said first study author Matthew Belyakov, a graduate student in planetary science at Caltech. "What JWST did for Nereid is it confirmed that it had a lot of water ice, and gave us the overall shape of the spectrum [of light]," Belyakov told Live Science in a phone call.

The telescope's observations of the moon revealed a composition that's significantly different from that of known Kuiper Belt objects, he continued. Crucially, JWST has been in space long enough to allow direct comparisons against Kuiper Belt worlds that the telescope itself has observed. "We're able to compare apples to apples," Belyakov added.

The moon-stealing planet

Previously, astronomers assumed that Nereid was "captured" by Neptune's gravity, like the planet's other known moons are suspected to have been. This is due to Nereid's orbit, which is highly elliptical — suggesting the moon was snatched from a previous, more stable orbit in the Kuiper Belt.

But that hypothesis is challenging to prove, given that Neptune has 16 known moons. Most of those moons are small, aside from Triton, which is slightly smaller than Earth's moon. The system is made up largely of small moons in irregular orbits.

"The trouble at Neptune is that we don't have any regular satellites really, whatsoever," Belyakov said.

Triton, Neptune's largest moon, represents 99% of the Neptunian moon system's mass and is on a "retrograde," or backward, orbit, Belyakov added. Triton is clearly a captured object ‪—‬ not only because of its odd orbit but also because observations have shown that its composition is more similar to Pluto's than to Neptune's, he said.

In the new study, the authors ran simulations of Triton's capture from the Kuiper Belt and how it may have affected the existing moons of Neptune. The simulations show that Triton's arrival gave the original Neptune moons a tremendous kick. "Triton gets captured and alters the original system, and creates a Nereid-like object," Belyakov explained.

Moon mysteries

To shore up this theory, Belyakov hopes to get a better look at Nereid in higher resolution. JWST is in high demand by astronomers, and Belyakov's team, which includes noted moon dynamicist and Caltech professor Konstantin Batygin, got a few minutes of telescope time using the lowest-resolution mode of JWST's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec). The team plans to submit an application for use of a higher-resolution mode of NIRSpec in a future call for telescope observations, he said.

These observations have implications not only for Neptune but also studies of exoplanets and gas giants, Belyakov emphasized.

"The big picture is that really we don't quite understand how moons around Uranus and Neptune form," Belyakov said. "What we're finding generally, in the study of exoplanets, is that planets of the size of Uranus and Neptune are pretty much the most common type of planet. And so if we don't understand how moons around these objects form, that's a really big problem."

The histories of Uranus and Neptune are making the study more challenging, he noted. Uranus is weirdly tilted on its side, perhaps due to a big collision with another object eons ago, which means its first generation of moons likely no longer exists.

"And at Neptune, we're also missing that first generation of moons," Belyakov said.The planet's innermost moons today were reforged from the original generation of moons that broke apart in the wake of Triton's arrival, the authors noted.

"So perhaps," he continued, "Nereid is the only original, sort of intact, remnant of satellites that originally formed around these planets. That would be a very exciting result, because it means that we have this one window to explore and understand satellites."

A unique, X-ray-spewing black hole may help to confirm the enigmatic identity of "little red dots," a curious class of objects that are observed mostly in the very early universe, approximately 12 billion light-years away.

Astronomers have sought to classify little red dots (LRDs) since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) first spotted them shortly after it began science operations in 2022.

Over the following few years, JWST discovered hundreds more of these ancient, compact curiosities, which look like little red dots partially because their light has been redshifted — stretched into longer wavelengths — as it has traveled across billions of light-years of expanding space-time to reach us. LRDs appear to be ephemeral, emerging around 600 million years after the Big Bang and then mostly disappearing over the next billion years.

Now, in a paper published March 16 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers have described an object that may illuminate the murky nature of LRDs.

Formally known as 3DHST-AEGIS-12014 and colloquially called the X-ray dot (XRD), this object had remained hidden in a survey conducted by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory more than a decade ago. Its importance was revealed only recently, after JWST observed the same cosmic field.

"It is always wonderful to see archival data aid in solving mysteries that were completely unknown when the data were first taken," Anthony Taylor, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the study, told Live Science via email. "This is a prime example of legacy science programs that continue to provide scientific value both upon their initial release and far into the future."

A single black hole may solve two cosmic mysteries

The XRD discovered by Chandra resembles an LRD, save for a few differences. The biggest one is that it is a bright source of X-ray light.

Normally, LRDs do not seem to emit X-rays. This anomaly has deepened the mystery of their identity, because active black holes commonly emit X-rays from their chaotic coronas, where infalling material reaches near light speeds and intense temperatures.

"If little red dots are rapidly growing supermassive black holes, why do they not give off X-rays like other such black holes?" co-author Anna de Graaff, an astrophysicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement.

As suggested in this study and in previous research, the X-rays may be blocked by thick cocoons of gas surrounding LRDs.

The XRD offers evidence of this process. As the black hole at its heart gorges on the surrounding gas, it clears holes in its cocoon. This forms sight lines into the object's interior and allows X-rays to escape, while also preserving its overall reddish appearance ‪—‬ picture a cosmic jack-o'-lantern with its eerie inner light bleeding into the dark.

"This single X-ray object may be — to use a phrase — what lets us connect all of the dots," lead author Raphael Hviding, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, said in the statement.

Unveiling an early-universe enigma

Overall, the XRD may help strengthen the idea that LRDs are young black holes in the midst of a transitional phase, during which they're enveloped in a dense cloud of gas. This gaseous shroud is similar in composition to some stellar atmospheres, earning LRDs an awe-inspiring appellation: "black hole stars."

Accordingly, if LRDs represent a phase of rapid gas accretion by young black holes, this period of quick consumption may help to explain how early supermassive black holes (SMBHs) grew so fat, so fast, accumulating many millions or billions of solar masses when the universe was only about 10% of its current age.

It is essential to study the evolution of these objects in more recent times. "LRD-like objects have actually been found in the modern universe but it is clear that LRD analogues are exceedingly rare," Hviding told Live Science via email. "Why? The short answer is that we don't know." One possibility is that giant gas reservoirs grow thinner as the universe evolves, he said.

Next-generation observatories like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will scan the sky for the rare, modern LRDs in the evolved universe. "They cannot go nearly as deep or as detailed as Webb," Hviding added, "but because they survey wide areas of the sky, finding rare analogues becomes viable."

In the meantime, the XRD warrants further observations. Maybe it isn't an elderly LRD, after all, but a more common SMBH veiled in an exotic dust never seen before. Either way, astronomers appear to have made a distinctive discovery that may elucidate a chain of cosmic mysteries in the evolution of the universe.

See how much you know about black holes with our black hole quiz!

Astronomers have spotted an intriguing triple-galaxy system, nicknamed "The Stingray," that dates to when the universe was just over 1.1 billion years old. A new analysis of the celestial sea creature has revealed an object that may provide clues about the nature of mysterious cosmic objects dubbed "little red dots" (LRDs).

LRDs were first observed in 2022 by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Astronomers initially proposed that these compact red objects, which seem to permeate the very early universe, could be galaxies that host actively feeding black holes known as active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Alternative LRD theories involve ancient supermassive stars on the verge of collapse and exotic black hole stars.

In the new study, published March 9 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, astronomers reconstructed the recent star formation history of the triple-galaxy stingray. They found that interactions between galaxies may have pushed an AGN into an unusual state resembling a transition into or out of a little red dot. Astronomers dubbed the galaxy that hosts this unusual AGN a ‘transitional little red dot’ (tLRD).

"We have all the necessary ingredients to produce such a transition: starbursts caused by galaxy interactions, an AGN, and a galaxy (tLRD) whose spectral features match almost all LRD criteria," lead study author Rosa María Mérida, an astrophysicist who studies galaxy formation and evolution at Saint Mary's University in Canada, told Live Science in an email.

The unique system's nickname came from its appearance: In early images, it resembled a stingray with a body, head and tail. However, later analysis revealed that the "tail" was formed by unrelated distant objects and had aligned by chance in the image.

The Stingray is made of three galaxies: a Balmer break galaxy that is relatively massive and evolving more steadily, a tLRD, and a satellite star-forming galaxy that is less massive and appears to have joined the system more recently.

Back to the past

Due to observational limitations, the researchers could not definitively determine how the three-galaxy system formed. Instead, they proposed a scenario based on indirect evidence. They did this by reconstructing the galaxies' star formation histories, using data from the Canadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey, one of the deepest JWST surveys to date.

By comparing these histories across galaxies and incorporating relative stellar masses, the team looked for patterns that might indicate past interactions. For example, if multiple galaxies showed changes in star formation at similar timescales, that could point to a shared event, such as a close encounter. Additionally, lower-mass galaxies with weaker gravity are more susceptible to disturbance, which may trigger bursts of star formation.

The team's analysis suggested that about 100 million years ago, the tLRD galaxy experienced a burst of star formation, which was likely triggered by an interaction with the nearby Balmer break galaxy. The more massive Balmer break galaxy, however, appeared largely unaffected and evolved steadily. Later, around 10 million years ago, the smaller satellite galaxy experienced increased star formation.

"We think this is the moment when the [satellite] galaxy entered the Stingray system," Mérida noted.

Around that time, some activity was observed in tLRD but not in the Balmer break galaxy. By this stage, tLRD also would have been quite massive, making this behavior difficult to explain through gravitational interactions alone. This raises the question of what drove the activity in tLRD, while the Balmer break galaxy shows little change in its star formation history. This suggests factors beyond simple gravitational interactions may be at work.

Part AGN, part LRD

The researchers proposed that the answer may lie in the behavior of the central black hole. Mérida explained that interactions between galaxies can trigger bursts of star formation, but the activation of an AGN can occur later. In this scenario, the earlier encounter may have first sparked star formation and then, with some delay, fueled the black hole in tLRD, pushing the galaxy into its unusual state.

The active black hole in tLRD shows spectral features of a type I AGN characterized by a bright and unobscured core. But it is also compact and bright in ultraviolet light, partly resembling a little red dot. However, it lacks one key spectral signature that almost all observed little red dots have in their light spectrum: a V-shaped feature. So it looks like a mix of both objects but not completely like either.

"This galaxy is strategically in between the little red dot population and compact Type I AGN," Mérida said. Therefore, tLRD is part AGN and part LRD, but it's unclear whether it is entering or exiting the LRD phase.

"The paper supports the idea that at least some little red dots are evolutionary phases rather than a wholly distinct class," Devesh Nandal, a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "The system is physically compact, spectroscopically confirmed, and the authors infer enhanced recent growth in the tLRD and [satellite galaxy]," compared what would be expected from their normal, internal processes, making their interaction-driven interpretation credible. However, while galaxy interactions may trigger or shut down the LRD phase, they do not fully explain the black hole's mass or the LRD phenomenon as a whole, Nandal noted.

What next?

If this transition phase is very short — less than about 5 million years — the chances of spotting a galaxy in that stage are very low, Mérida said. In that case, tLRD might just be a normal AGN. But if the transition lasts longer, astronomers should find many such transitional objects in current galaxy surveys. That means researchers need to do two things: carefully search existing data for more candidates, and improve theoretical models to predict how often these transitions happen and determine how to clearly identify them.

A larger sample size of such "in-between" objects and a better understanding of how long the AGN spends in active and quiet phases can establish the new results more robustly, Nandal said. A clear distinction between how the black hole is currently feeding and how the black hole originally formed is also crucial, he said. For example, the black hole may have already existed as a massive seed from a supermassive star or other origin; in that case, the LRD-like activity we observe now likely reflects later fueling or dust obscuration rather than the black hole forming from scratch.

The team plans to conduct follow-up studies on The Stingray and other LRDs found in the Canadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey. If confirmed, this transitional object would support the idea that little red dots are not a separate class of objects but a temporary phase in the evolution of a black hole system, with their behavior controlled by their surroundings.

What do you know about black holes? Test your knowledge with our black hole quiz!

Saturn may be famous for its rings, but it has long fascinated scientists for another reason: its restless atmosphere, which is shaped by fierce winds, stubborn megastorms and strange weather patterns that can linger for years.

Now, two new views from the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes are cutting through the ringed planet's clouds, giving researchers what NASA calls the "most comprehensive view of Saturn to date." Together, the images let researchers "slice" through Saturn's atmosphere at different heights.

The paired observations capture one of Saturn's strangest landmarks: the famous hexagon at the north pole. According to NASA, the faint edges of the six-sided jet stream appear in both images. These pictures could be some of the last high-resolution views of the hexagon until the 2040s, as Saturn's north pole is about to tip into 15 years of winter darkness.

Studying Saturn's atmosphere not only allows scientists to understand how large, planet-size storms grow and thrive but also gives further insight into how the planet formed and evolved over billions of years.

A planet seen two ways

In August 2024, Hubble took its visible-light image of Saturn as part of the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program, a decade-long project that tracks the outer planets annually. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured its infrared image a few months later, in November 2024. Those observations, taken 14 weeks apart, showed the ringed planet shifting from northern summer toward its 2025 equinox.

The two telescopes saw very different Saturns.

While Hubble captured Saturn's pale-yellow bands and brilliant-white rings, JWST's infrared image revealed even more striking details. In the infrared view, Saturn's rings transformed into glowing blue "because they are made of highly reflective water ice," NASA representatives said in a statement. Saturn's poles also shone a strange gray-green, emitting light at wavelengths of about 4.3 microns. These emissions could be from either light scattering off of high-altitude aerosols or auroras, NASA suggested. (The telescope recently caught giant auroras shining on Uranus.)

As Saturn tilts into its southern springtime, both space telescopes will continue to keep their eyes on its atmosphere, perhaps revealing more about the planet's weather dynamics. Until then, Saturn is keeping some of its most interesting secrets hidden in the clouds.

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Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is up to 12 billion years old and unlike anything found in our solar system, new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations suggest.

Comet 3I/ATLAS became a celestial celebrity last year after the interstellar visitor was discovered hurtling through our cosmic neighborhood. Not long after, online speculation suggested that the space rock could be an alien spacecraft. However, most astronomers are confident that 3I/ATLAS is a comet from an unknown star system.

Now, new preliminary findings from a study posted to the preprint server Research Square, which are still under peer review, suggest the comet formed in a cold and distant region of the Milky Way around 10 billion to 12 billion years ago. That would make comet 3I/ATLAS more than twice as old as Earth (4.5 billion years old) and our solar system (4.6 billion years old), and at its upper range, not far off the ages of our Milky Way galaxy and the universe itself (about 13.6 and 13.8 billion years old).

Researchers already knew from the comet's speed and trajectory that it was potentially the oldest comet ever seen. Previous estimates put the comet's age at somewhere between 3 billion and 11 billion years old. The new findings further narrowed down the comet's age and origin by looking at isotope measurements taken by JWST when the comet flew past Earth in December 2025.

"They show that 3I/ATLAS isotopic composition is very different from solar system comets and suggest that it likely formed 10-12 billion years ago," Romain Maggiolo, a research scientist at the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "In other words, 3I/ATLAS formed in a stellar environment different from ours, not only somewhere else in space, but also at a much earlier time in the history of the Milky Way."

Comet 3I/ATLAS is only the third interstellar object ever recorded in our solar system. The space rock, which Hubble Space Telescope observations suggest is somewhere between 1,400 feet (440 meters) and 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) wide, zoomed into our solar system at around 137,000 mph(221,000 km/h) last year before slingshotting around the sun.

After reaching its closest point to our star, known as perihelion, on Oct. 29, 2025, the comet then made its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 19, when it came within about 168 million miles (270 million km) of our planet. JWST made the observations that have been analyzed in the new study a few days later on Dec. 22.

A relic from the ancient universe

Comets heat up as they fly closer to stars, which causes ice on their surfaces to sublimate into gas. By studying the composition of this gas, researchers can start to figure out what they're made of and the conditions in which they formed.

The authors of the new preprint looked at the ratio of isotopes, or versions of elements, in material outgassed by 3I/ATLAS. They found that the comet's water is more enriched in deuterium, a heavier hydrogen isotope, than any previously studied comet, while its ratio of carbon isotopes also exceeded levels normally seen in our solar system.

The results offer clues to what conditions may have been like in whatever ancient planetary systems forged the comet in the early years of the Milky Way.

"If 3I/ATLAS is indeed as old as this study suggests, the large amounts of volatile molecules it contains indicate that rich prebiotic chemistry may already have been occurring in star-forming regions very early in the history of our Galaxy," Maggiolo said.

The results also indicate that the comet formed in a cold environment that was around 30 kelvins (minus 406 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 243 degrees Celsius), likely in a dense and well-shielded protoplanetary disk, according to the study.

While the study is still in the preprint stage, Maggiolo, who has studied comet 3I/ATLAS as part of his own research, didn't have any major concerns about it. The new measurements help researchers "better understand this interstellar messenger," he said.

Josep Trigo-Rodríguez, the research principal investigator of the Asteroids, Comets and Meteorites research group at the Institute of Space Sciences (CSIC/IEEC) in Spain who has previously identified erupting "ice volcanoes" on comet 3I/ATLAS, described the new findings as a good compilation of scientific results, using different techniques from well-recognized experts.

"This manuscript exemplifies that interstellar comets are unique bodies that are able to sample remote regions of our Milky Way galaxy," Trigo-Rodríguez told Live Science in an email.

There's a good chance that researchers will never know which star system birthed comet 3I/ATLAS. The comet has likely been traveling through space for billions of years and has come a very long way in that time. Maggiolo's own research has found evidence that the object is extremely irradiated, with all that time in space exposing it to cosmic rays that could have fundamentally altered its chemical composition, making its origins more difficult to decipher.

"The isotopic composition of the material outgassed by 3I/ATLAS provides a crucial new piece of the puzzle," Maggiolo said. "But the puzzle is far from being complete!"

Finding those puzzle pieces is a race against time for astronomers, as comet 3I/ATLAS is now hurtling out of the solar system. It's currently passing Jupiter, where it is expected to make its closest approach on Sunday (March 15). The comet will come within about 33 million miles (54 million km) of the gas giant — much closer than it got to Earth.

The interstellar traveller will then continue its journey away from us, crossing Saturn's orbit in July, Uranus' orbit in April 2027 and Neptune's orbit in March 2028. You can track the comet using NASA's Eyes on the Solar System simulation of the comet's trajectory.

The powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed never-before-seen details of a cosmic "cranium" made of the glowing remains of a dying star.

This brainy object, named PMR 1, is a planetary nebula — an expanding shell of ionized gas and dust expelled by a star in the final stages of its evolution, when the nuclear fuel within its core is depleted. It was first spotted in 2014 by the Spitzer Space Telescope (a predecessor to JWST) but has been little studied until now.

The colorful cloud is said to resemble a brain encased within a transparent skull, which has led to it being dubbed the "Exposed Cranium" nebula.

The new image comes in two parts, captured by different instruments: the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on the left and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on the right. By observing the object at different wavelengths, JWST can reveal intricate details that were previously invisible, according to NASA.

In the NIRCam image, the nebula's outer bubble appears with a bright white edge, while the inner clouds glow orange. It highlights a distinctive dark lane that cuts vertically through the center, creating the illusion of two hemispheres, like a brain. Stars and distant background galaxies are also visible through the nebula's outer shell in near-infrared light.

Things look different in the MIRI image, where mid-infrared light shows an outer bubble that appears bluish with a touch of purple. The glowing clouds within the nebula look thicker and more complex, while the central dark lane is less visible because it's partially obscured by dust and gas.

That dark lane is a great example of why Webb's ability to see the universe in multiple wavelengths of light is so valuable to astronomers. While the dark streak is much easier to see in the NIRCam image, it appears to be more closely connected to twin eruptions of gas at the top and bottom of the nebula as seen in the MIRI image. Together, the two images paint a more complete picture of exactly what is happening in this cosmic cranium.

The images also provide an insight into multiple stages of the star's evolution, with an outer shell of hydrogen gas expelled earlier in the star's life and inner clouds of a mixture of gases and dust expelled more recently.

What will eventually happen to the star at the center of PMR 1 depends on its mass: it will either explode as a supernova or continue to shed layers, leaving behind a dense, shriveled core known as a white dwarf star.

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The moon will officially be spared from an explosive encounter with a "city-killer" asteroid in 2032, new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal.

Collected on Feb. 18 and Feb. 26 with JWST's sensitive infrared instruments, the new observations of the near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4 allowed NASA astronomers to refine previous estimates of the space rock's trajectory — dropping the chances of a lunar impact from 4.3% to zero.

Instead, the menacing asteroid will pass by the moon at a nail-biting 13,200 miles (21,200 kilometers) from the lunar surface, which is closer than some artificial satellites orbit Earth, according to a March 5 NASA statement. Meanwhile, 2024 YR4 will miss Earth by hundreds of thousands of miles when it swings back through the inner solar system on its close approach six years from now.

According to NASA, this latest round of observations was only possible thanks to JWST's extreme sensitivity, but it still pushed the telescope to its limits.

"Since spring of 2025, the asteroid has been unobservable from both Earth and space-based observatories except for this use of Webb," NASA officials said in the statement. These new JWST snapshots of 2024 YR4 are "among the faintest ever observations of an asteroid" in history, they added.

"The challenge was significant," representiteves from the European Space Agency (ESA), which co-manages JWST along with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, said in a separate statement. "To use one of the most complex machines humankind has ever built to track an almost invisible object many millions of kilometres away – and then accurately predict its position almost seven years into the future."

Riskiest asteroid ever

Asteroid 2024 YR4 was discovered in late 2024 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) network

Subsequent telescope observations soon showed that the space rock was a whopper, measuring between 174 and 220 feet (53 to 67 meters) in diameter — about as wide as the Leaning Tower of Pisa is tall — and that its trajectory would bring it extremely close to Earth. If an asteroid this size were to hit our planet, it could wipe out a city with the equivalent force of 500 Hiroshima bombs, Live Science previously reported, earning it the "city killer" nickname.

While telescope data on the asteroid was still limited, astronomers estimated that it had a slight chance of smashing into Earth. The predicted likelihood of a collision peaked at 3.1%, which were the highest odds of a potential asteroid collision ever. Within months, new data from JWST and other telescopes brought those odds down to zero, while the chances of a lunar collision remained at 4.3%.

What's next for 2024 YR4?

What would happen if such a large asteroid hit the moon? It certainly wouldn't be the first time the moon took a hit from a space rock, but it would have been the first time scientists could predict a large lunar impact from a known asteroid and watch it happen in real time.

Some astronomers theorized that the resulting explosion could have been visible from Earth with the naked eye, while others warned of a potential rain of debris that could trigger a brand-new meteor shower over our planet.

Now, with Earth and the moon officially safe from 2024 YR4, the asteroid will remain a tempting target for astronomers who want to test planetary defense models, and it could help us prepare for additional close encounters. NASA plans to watch the asteroid with JWST again in 2028, when it heads back our way — and passes by safely.

Update: This article was updated on March 6 at 11 a.m. ET to add new images and quotes from ESA

Scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope just mapped the mysterious upper atmosphere of Uranus for the first time, revealing strange new features of the planet's mysterious magnetic field and glowing auroras.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observed Uranus rotating for 15 hours (nearly a full Uranian day) to learn more about how ice giants distribute energy in the upper layers of their atmospheres and to investigate how the planet's auroras operate.

Uranus' magnetic field is unique among the big planets of our solar system in that its magnetic pole is tilted by 60 degrees relative to its geographic pole. That tilt produces auroras that extend far beyond the poles of Uranus, unlike auroras on Earth.

To learn more, scientists used JWST to study Uranus' magnetosphere — the region of space around Uranus that's dominated by the planet's magnetic field.

"Uranus's magnetosphere is one of the strangest in the solar system," study lead author Paola Tiranti, a doctoral student at Northumbria University in the U.K., said in a European Space Agency (ESA) statement. "Webb has now shown us how deeply those effects reach into the atmosphere."

Strange lights on Uranus

JWST charted "the most detailed portrait yet" of how particles in Uranus' upper atmosphere are energized (ionized) by interactions with the sun, ESA officials said in the statement. The study, published Feb. 19 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, aimed to measure ion temperature and density as far as 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) above the cloud tops of Uranus.

Temperature and density do not peak at the same altitude, JWST showed. Ions were the warmest between roughly 2,500 and 3,100 miles (4,000 and 5,000 km) but the densest at about 600 miles (1,000 km). This is because of the "complex geometry" of the planet's magnetic field, ESA officials said in the statement.

That geometry also produced two bright bands of auroras near Uranus' magnetic poles. In between the aurora belts, however, there is a "depletion" in both ion density and auroral emissions — an effect likely produced by transitions between the planet's magnetic-field lines, the scientists said. Observations at Jupiter's upper atmosphere have shown similar transition regions.

In addition to charting Uranus' upper atmosphere in three dimensions for the first time, JWST confirmed findings from previous studies that suggested the planet's upper atmosphere has been cooling steadily since the early 1990s. The telescope showed the average temperature of Uranus' atmosphere is about 307 degrees Fahrenheit (153 degrees Celsius), which is lower than the temperature measurements from other spacecraft and ground-based telescopes.

"By revealing Uranus's vertical structure in such detail, Webb is helping us understand the energy balance of the ice giants," Tiranti said. "This is a crucial step towards characterizing giant planets beyond our solar system."

James Webb Space Telescope quiz: How well do you know the world's most powerful telescope?

This stunning image showcases what astronomers think is the most distant galaxy protocluster ever found, and it holds a very important clue about the history of the universe.

Located 12.7 billion light-years away from Earth, the protocluster, dubbed JADES-ID1, appears in this image as a collection of glowing dots and specks embedded within a large blue cloud.

A protocluster is simply a galaxy cluster in its infancy. It is a region with a large number of young galaxies that are being pulled together by gravity, contained within a large cloud of hot gas. Galaxy clusters are vast collections of hundreds to thousands of galaxies that are held together by gravity, and a protocluster essentially shows how such a large structure forms and grows.

However, in protoclusters, galaxies are not as tightly bound together as they are in mature galaxy clusters. Additionally, the surrounding hot gas that usually makes clusters easy to spot is not developed enough to emit detectable X-rays. Therefore, detecting a protocluster is challenging.

Scientists discovered JADES-ID1using the deepest observations from two powerful telescopes: the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). JWST's infrared instruments detected at least 66 galaxies held together by gravity in this region. Because JADES-ID1 possessed enough mass to heat its surrounding gas to very high temperatures, Chandra detected the X-ray emissions from the large cloud of hot gas that contains all these galaxies. This provided further evidence that these galaxies are part of a single entity.

In the annotated version of the image, some of the individual galaxies identified by JWST's infrared observations are circled. The neon blue region represents the hot gas detected in X-rays by Chandra.

A real puzzle surrounding this discovery is its place on the timeline of the history of the universe. Astronomers found that JADES-ID1 has the mass of 20 trillion suns and spans about 1.1 million light-years across. Most models of the universe predict that a protocluster this massive should not form until between 2 and 3 billion years after the Big Bang. However, surprisingly, JADES-ID1 is estimated to have existed when the universe was only about one billion years old.

“This may be the most distant confirmed protocluster ever seen,” lead author of the study Akos Bogdan of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), said in a statement. “JADES-ID1 is giving us new evidence that the universe was in a huge hurry to grow up.”

Astronomers are now curious about how this protocluster formed so quickly. That’s because, according to current models, there wouldn’t have been enough time or enough galaxies in the first billion years of the universe for a protocluster of such a size to come together.

The study was published Jan. 28 in the journal Nature.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

James Webb Space Telescope quiz: How well do you know the world's most powerful telescope?

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have mapped the largest section of the universe's dark matter yet, deepening our understanding of how this mysterious substance shapes the cosmic landscape.

Dark matter is notoriously difficult to study because it does not interact with light. Astronomers can detect it only by looking at its gravitational effects on baryonic, or "ordinary," matter. Observations of these interactions reveal that there is about five times as much dark matter in the universe as normal matter.

The new study, published Jan. 26 in the journal Nature Astronomy, mapped a piece of sky in the Sextans constellation. Researchers pointed JWST at this space for 255 hours, constructing a picture of its visible matter, including stars, galaxies and cosmic dust. From these observations, they identified nearly 800,000 galaxies — 10 times more than ground-based telescopes have seen in the same region, and nearly twice as many as the Hubble Space Telescope has spotted there.

Next, the team charted how the mass of this area's invisible dark matter warped the space around it.

"Previously, we were looking at a blurry picture of dark matter," Diana Scognamiglio, an astrophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and co-lead author of the paper, said in a statement. "Now, we're seeing the invisible scaffolding of the universe in stunning detail."

Where galaxies come from

This detailed map could give scientists a better idea of how dark matter has shaped the evolution of the universe.

Shortly after the Big Bang, dark matter and ordinary matter were probably evenly distributed throughout space. But over time, dark matter began to clump together. This, in turn, pulled the ordinary matter into increasingly dense pockets, where it eventually collected enough mass to spark star formation.

In this way, dark matter was instrumental in creating the current layout and matter distribution of the cosmos. "This map provides stronger evidence that without dark matter, we might not have the elements in our galaxy that allowed life to appear," study co-author Jason Rhodes, a senior research scientist at JPL, said in the statement.

Scognamiglio and her team plan to keep mapping dark matter in the future. They intend to use NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch later this year, to study an area 4,400 times the size of the region from the new study. However, Roman's map of dark matter will be significantly less detailed than JWST's.

A spectacular new image of the Helix Nebula captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveals the death throes of a sunlike star — and perhaps a harbinger of our own solar system's fate.

The Helix Nebula, also called the "Eye of God" or "Eye of Sauron," is one of the closest, most colorful and most studied planetary nebulas in space. The well-known and nearby starscape was destined to get JWST's near-infrared treatment, which reveals cosmic structures only hinted at by other space telescopes.

A planetary nebula is the slightly confusing name for a cloud of gas (primarily hydrogen and helium) and fine cosmic dust ejected by a dying, sunlike star as it sheds its outer layers, according to NASA. That star, a dense and hot white dwarf at the center of the cloud, ionizes the surrounding gas, causing it to glow in vibrant colors — in this case, in a helix-like (or corkscrew-like) structure, as seen from the solar system. (These bright, often circular nebulas resembled planets when viewed through early telescopes, earning them their title.)

Within this colorful scene, a vital process is unfolding: A star's former outer layers, now expanding into interstellar space, are seeding the galaxy with carbon, oxygen and nitrogen — the same elements that make life on Earth possible.

Using its Near-Infrared Camera, JWST pierced the Helix Nebula deeper than ever before. In this close-up of a small section of the nebula around the white dwarf, thousands of orange and gold, comet-like pillars stream upward. These features, technically called "cometary knots," separate high-speed stellar winds from the dying star and older, cooler layers of gas shed earlier in its life.

A partial orange semicircle at the bottom, where the pillars are more densely concentrated, is the circumference of the shell. The blackness of space hovers above, along with some blue background stars.

As is typical in space telescope images, filters have teased out the temperature and chemistry of the nebula, which changes according to its distance from the white dwarf. Close to the star, a blue glow is produced by ultraviolet radiation, igniting hot, ionized gas. Farther from the star, it gets cooler, with molecular hydrogen shown in yellow and deep-red dust even farther out.

As the potential seeds of the next generation of stars and planets, that dust is, in part, what makes this image so exciting — the image shows the life cycle of matter. Radiation and expelled material from a dying star create regions where more complex molecules can survive and grow.

It may be beautiful, but the Helix Nebula is a cosmic recycling center and, ultimately, a blueprint for what will happen to the sun when it expands into a red giant, sheds its outer layers, and leaves behind a white dwarf in about 5 billion years.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Bordered by orange and brown clouds of gas and dust and filled with shimmering stars, this new image from the James Webb Space Telescope appears to show a portal to a cosmic wonderland.

In reality, it features a prominent star cluster known as Westerlund 2, which is located within a star-forming nebula known as Gum 29. The entire scene is playing out 20,000 light-years from Earth, within the Milky Way galaxy.

The sparkling cluster is compact, measuring between 6 light-years and 13 light-years in diameter, and it is home to approximately 3,000 stars, according to a statement from the European Space Agency. Seen here at a young age of about 2 million years, this cluster contains some of the hottest, brightest and most massive stars in our galaxy.

Westerlund 2 was also captured by the Hubble Space Telescope 10 years ago to commemorate Hubble's 25th anniversary in orbit. That image, created using visible light and some near-infrared data, revealed the complex features of the cluster and its surrounding nebula, showcasing a stunning landscape of pillars, ridges, and valleys of dust.

Now, the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed an even more vibrant view of the cluster, which is teeming with bright young stars. This latest portrait combines infrared data from the telescope's Near-Infrared Camera and Mid-Infrared Instrument.

The stunning image highlights not only the young, massive stars but also the clouds and walls of dust shaped by their intense light. These sculpted regions are surrounded by wisps of orange and red gas, brilliantly illuminated by the powerful light of the nearby stars.

The entire scene is interconnected by a network of blue and pink wisps that appear to be material drifting off the scene. Several tiny stars look like they have just begun shining, still embedded in the thick cloud in which they formed. Larger and brighter stars that are much closer to us display an eight-pronged diffraction pattern created by the interaction of starlight with the telescope's instruments.

The twinkling display of countless stars is a result of a continuous cycle of star formation in which the baby stars in the stellar nursery blast out intense radiation that then heats the surrounding nebula and triggers new stars to form.

The new observations, taken across a wide range of infrared wavelengths, include bands that are sensitive to methane and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) emission. While PAH emission traces heated gas and dust, methane traces low-mass cold objects. As a result, astronomers identified a population of brown dwarfs — or "failed stars" — including objects only about 10 times the mass of Jupiter.

Brown dwarfs are peculiar objects that straddle the line between stars and planets. They have masses in between those of typical stars and those of planets, ranging between 10 and 90 times the mass of Jupiter. However, they do not have enough mass to trigger nuclear fusion in their cores. The James Webb telescope's new observations could reveal insight into the different stages in a star's life and how planet-forming disks around massive stars work.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

A shock wave, far away in space, might be the telltale sign of the first confirmed "runaway" supermassive black hole, escaping its host galaxy at 2.2 million miles per hour (3.6 million km/h).

The potential confirmation by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), published on the preprint server Arxiv on Dec. 3, has not yet been peer-reviewed. But it has been submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters and lead study author Pieter van Dokkum, a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University, has published several peer-reviewed papers about candidate supermassive black holes in recent years.

Van Dokkum says this is the first confirmation of a runaway supermassive black hole, following five decades of theory and research about these objects. "The obvious next step is to look for more examples," he told LiveScience.

Tracing a stream of stars

The candidate black hole was first spotted back in 2023 by van Dokkum's team, who saw a faint line in an archival Hubble Space Telescope image. The sight was so strange that the team followed up with fresh observations from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Observations back then showed that the black hole has a mass of 20 million suns, and that the strange line was a "wake" of young stars stretching 200,000 light-years across space — twice the diameter of the entire Milky Way. The Hubble image captures a moment in time when the universe was roughly half its current age of 13.8 billion years.

"We suspected that this strange object might be a runaway supermassive black hole, but we did not have 'smoking gun' proof," van Dokkum said. So, for their new research, the team turned to JWST, a deep-space observatory that is unique in its "sensitivity and sharpness," van Dokkum said, "to see the bow shock that is created by the speeding black hole."

The resulting imagery astounded the team.

JWST's mid-infrared instrument rendered the shockwave, or bow shock, at the leading edge of the candidate black hole's escape with unprecedented clarity. "It's a bit like the waves created by a ship," van Dokkum said. "In this case, the ship is a black hole and very difficult to see, but we can see the 'water' — really, hydrogen and oxygen gas — that [the black hole] pushes out in front of it."

Van Dokkum was astonished. "Everything about this object told us it was something really special, but seeing this clear signature in the data was incredibly satisfying," he added.

Aside from JWST's sheer resolution, van Dokkum said his study showed that the observations matched Hubble's and Keck's data in different wavelengths of light. The data "all provide different pieces of the puzzle," he said, "and they fit together beautifully — exactly as predicted by theoretical models."

A supermassive mystery

Studying runaway black holes, like this candidate one, shows scientists more about how galaxies and black holes evolved, van Dokkum said. Most large galaxies have supermassive black holes embedded in their center, including our own Milky Way. Whether they can escape their tight galactic bonds is a longstanding mystery.

The only way that a supermassive black hole could be ripped out of its galaxy, according to van Dokkum, is if at least two of these black holes got extraordinarily close to each other, with the intense gravitational interaction "kicking" one out of place.

The new research suggests the candidate runaway was produced after at least two, and potentially as many as three, black holes all interacted. With masses of at least 10 million suns each, van Dokkum said the violence of the encounter must have been "quite something."

As for where to look next for a runaway supermassive black hole, the research paper notes "several promising candidates," but the interpretation of these systems is difficult. One example is the ambiguous object known as the "Cosmic Owl," which is roughly 11 billion light-years away from Earth.

The Cosmic Owl, according to the new paper, includes two galactic nuclei — each with an active supermassive black hole at the galaxy's heart — and a third supermassive black hole that is, oddly, "embedded in a gas cloud" between the two galaxies.

How that third black hole arrived in a gas cloud is a matter of dispute. Some researchers say the black hole may be a runaway that escaped from one of the host galaxies, but JWST observations by van Dokkum's group challenge that interpretation. Their observations suggest the out-of-place black hole "more likely … formed in-situ through a direct collapse" of gas, produced by shockwaves after the two galaxies nearly collided with one another.

Further study is needed on this, and other objects that may contain possible black hole runaways. Van Dokkum cited the current Euclid and forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman space telescopes as promising survey instruments, since these telescopes are designed to look at the whole sky, unlike JWST. "That will tell us how often this happens — something we'd dearly like to know."

On a cloudy winter's day, in the Amazon jungle, a shuttle blasted off into space — and changed our view of the universe forever.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) left Earth aboard an Ariane 5 rocket at 25,000 mph (40,000 km/h) "from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself," according to a live broadcast from NASA.

About a month later, it reached its orbiting parking place in space, a gravitationally-stable Lagrange point 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away, in perfect equilibrium between Earth and the sun's gravity. The telescope would beam back its first, spectacular pictures in July 2022. And the firehose of data it has sent back since has transformed our understanding of the cosmos.

JWST has been so pivotal in part because it can peer back to the "cosmic dawn," a period a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars were winking on.

"The James Webb Space Telescope has proven itself capable of seeing 98% of the way back to the Big Bang," Peter Jakobsen, an affiliate professor of astrophysics at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, previously told Live Science in an email.

Yet Webb, which was first conceived at Lockheed Martin in the late 1990s, almost didn't launch at all. The now-iconic, $10 billion project was catastrophically over budget, plagued by years' worth of delays and snarled by "stupid mistakes."

That was in part because, when it launched, it was by far the most complex telescope ever built.

It took more than 20,000 engineers and hundreds of scientists to design, build and launch the eye in the sky. That 21.3 feet (6.5 meter) mirror had to be folded into a honeycomb shape to be lofted on a rocket, then unfolded once in space. Yet despite being foldable, it also had to be so smooth that if it were as big as a continent, "it would feature no hill or valley greater than ankle height," according to Quanta Magazine.

To see the earliest epochs of cosmic history, Webb needed infrared vision. That's because ancient light has been stretched, or red-shifted, into infrared wavelengths as it travels across space-time. On Earth, humans and every other living thing give off heat in the form of infrared radiation, and that would drown out the faint infrared signals from the most distant, ancient starlight. So JWST needed to be lofted into the cold dark of outer space to use its infrared instruments.

Once JWST started imaging the cosmos, it promptly began breaking our existing models of the universe. It rapidly confirmed the Hubble tension — the discrepancy between the universe's expansion rates depending on where and what astronomers measure. It has found hints of potentially life-sustaining atmospheres shrouding distant exoplanets. And it has spotted shockingly bright galaxies and seemingly "impossible" black holes at the dawn of time. All these clues are pointing to new understandings of the universe.

Some of the questions JWST is raising, such as whether other planets harbor life, it will probably not be able to answer in its planned 10-year lifespan. But future telescopes — such as the currently operational Vera C. Rubin Observatory, meant to create a real-time "movie of the universe"; the recently completed Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, set to launch in 2027 and resolve questions about dark matter and energy; the Extremely Large Telescope, set to turn on in 2029; or the recently announced Habitable Worlds Observatory, which may come online in the 2030s — could start to answer the questions that Webb is raising.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected a supermassive black hole hiding in an ancient "Jekyll and Hyde" galaxy that changes its appearance depending on how you look at it.

The galaxy, nicknamed Virgil, looked like an ordinary star-forming galaxy when observed in optical wavelengths (the kind of light that human eyes and optical telescopes like Hubble can see). However, when JWST viewed the object in infrared via its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), a monster black hole became visible in the galaxy's core.

"Virgil has two personalities," George Rieke, an astronomer at the University of Arizona who co-led the discovery, said in a statement released Dec. 10. "The UV and optical show its 'good' side — a typical young galaxy quietly forming stars. But when MIRI data are added, Virgil transforms into the host of a heavily obscured supermassive black hole pouring out immense quantities of energy."

Rieke and his colleagues published their findings Nov. 17 in The Astrophysical Journal. The findings suggest that some of our universe's most extreme objects could be invisible unless observed in infrared wavelengths.

Light takes a long time to travel across the galaxy, so when a powerful telescope like JWST observes distant objects, it sees the objects as they appeared in the distant past. Basically, JWST acts like a time machine into the early universe. Virgil appears to JWST as it existed 800 million years after the Big Bang. (For context, the universe is thought to be around 13.8 billion years old.)

The researchers classified Virgil as a little red dot (LRD). This is the name given to mysterious red objects that appear in JWST observations of the distant, early universe, and that astronomers don't fully understand.

LRDs appear in large numbers at around 600 million years after the Big Bang, before rapidly declining at around 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. Observing galaxies like Virgil should help researchers unravel the mysteries of LRDs, which have been linked to actively feeding supermassive black holes that are heavily obscured by dust.

JWST's Virgil observations also help researchers better understand how supermassive black holes grew in the early universe. The one at the center of Virgil was a so-called "overmassive" black hole — meaning a massive black hole that shouldn't be able to exist in a host galaxy of that size, according to the statement.

Astronomers used to think that black holes at the centers of galaxies grew at the same rate as their hosts, with the galaxies forming first and growing black holes over time as large quantities of matter coalesced at their centers. However, JWST observations like this one suggest that the opposite might be true — first comes the black hole, then the galaxy around it.

"JWST has shown that our ideas about how supermassive black holes formed were pretty much completely wrong," Rieke said. "It looks like the black holes actually get ahead of the galaxies in a lot of cases. That's the most exciting thing about what we're finding."

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may have discovered the most distant supernova in the universe. This stellar explosion, hosted by a very faint galaxy, occurred when the universe was only 730 million years old.

Besides adding a new potential record to JWST's already-impressive list, this detection provides insight into the origin of a superbright gamma-ray burst observed in March. These sudden, short-lived outbursts of gamma-rays are among the most powerful explosions in the universe.

Dubbed GRB 250314A, the burst of energy was discovered by the Space Variable Objects Monitor, a small X-ray telescope developed by China and France. Within a couple of days of the initial alert, scientists estimated that the intense flash originated from a very distant object that existed just 730 million years after the Big Bang.

Because not many of these high-energy events have been discovered within the first billion years of the universe, this was a rare chance for astronomers to understand how early-universe stars and galaxies evolve.

When two research teams examined the properties of this gamma-ray burst, they found evidence that it may have been produced by an exploding star at the edge of the universe — confirming one of the team's predictions.

"We were amazed that our predictions worked so well, and that we had been able to demonstrate that JWST could see individual exploding stars at such extreme distances," A.J. Levan, lead author of one of the two papers and a professor at Radboud University in the Netherlands and the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, told Live Science in an email.

Both new studies were published Dec. 9 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

A hunt for clues

Short gamma-ray bursts, which last less than two seconds, are thought to arise from mergers of neutron stars, the ultradense remnants of dead stars. Long gamma-ray bursts, by contrast, are produced when massive stars collapse to form a neutron star or a black hole.

The initial burst from GRB 250314A lasted around 10 seconds, placing it comfortably in the long-duration category. Therefore, researchers were curious to know if the gamma-ray burst was produced by a supernova — the catastrophic death of a massive star.

Although gamma-ray bursts last only a few seconds to minutes, they leave behind an afterglow — smoothly fading light with energy lower than gamma-rays (X-rays, optical light, radio and infrared) that lasts several days. Because gamma-ray bursts are so brief, most of the information about them is revealed by their longer-lasting afterglows.

To confirm their predictions, the researchers had to separate the light from the afterglow, the supernova and the host galaxy. GRB 250314A produced a detectable infrared and X-ray afterglow, but luckily, it faded by the time JWST observed the site months later. Hence, this glow was expected to be too faint to explain the observed light, indicating that another source contributed to it.

"This leaves us to disentangle the [light from the] galaxy and the supernova," Levan said. If most of the light was produced by the host galaxy, then the galaxy should have been a very compact and unusually old galaxy with stars that formed at close to 200 million years after the Big Bang.

"This would be an interesting result in its own right because we don't see many galaxies like this, and in particular, this isn't the sort of galaxy you'd expect to find a gamma-ray burst in," he added.

Therefore, the gamma-ray burst's properties could be explained only by a supernova, the team concluded.

The distant twin

The brightness of a supernova depends on how much radioactive material is expelled during the explosion. This, in turn, is determined by the mass of the star's core when it explodes.

For several reasons, astronomers think stars in the early universe may have had more massive cores than those seen today. The supernova associated with GRB 250314A, therefore, offered a rare opportunity to study the nature of early-universe stars. Because GRB 250314A was possibly the earliest supernova ever observed, the researchers compared it with supernovas seen in the nearby universe. Surprisingly, it turned out to be remarkably similar to modern stellar explosions.

"This may be a chance; after all, it is only one object," Levan said. "However, it could also suggest that the exploding stars [in the early universe] — and thus the overall stellar population — aren't as different as we think.."

To confirm that it is a supernova, researchers still need to reestimate how much of the observed light comes from the supernova itself and how much originates from the afterglow or the host galaxy. They plan to carry out follow-up observations next year, after the supernova has faded, which will make it much easier to separate the contributions from these different sources.

Scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have spotted the first evidence of "monster stars" in the early universe — offering new clues to how supermassive black holes grew so big after only a billion years of the universe's history.

The team spotted these gargantuan stars — each with a mass of between 1,000 and 10,000 times our sun — in a galaxy called GS 3073, which formed roughly about a billion years after the Big Bang. It is believed that monster stars like these led to the formation of these early supermassive black holes.

The study was co-led by scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., and was published Nov. 12 in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"Our latest discovery helps solve a 20-year cosmic mystery," study co-author Daniel Whalen, from Portsmouth's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, said in a statement. "These cosmic giants would have burned brilliantly for a brief time, before collapsing into massive black holes, leaving behind the chemical signatures we can detect billions of years later."

"A bit like dinosaurs on Earth, they were enormous and primitive," Whalen added. "And they had short lives, living for just a quarter of a million years, a cosmic blink of an eye."

The research's implications include learning about the first generation of stars, as well as literally shedding light on the "cosmic dark ages", or the period of time when the first stars came to light and the chemistry of the universe began to change.

A peculiar signature

The stars in GS 3073 had an unusual and "extreme" imbalance of nitrogen to oxygen (a ratio of 0.46) not usually found in stars or stellar explosions, according to the team. The signature, however, matched something predicted in models: "primordial stars thousands of times more massive than our sun," study co-author Devesh Nandal, a postdoctoral fellow at the CfA's Institute for Theory and Computation, said.

How did these stars produce so much nitrogen? The researchers said it's a three-step process. Stars are constantly burning elements in their cores. As these large stars in GS 3073 burned helium, the chemical reactions created carbon. Eventually, carbon began to invade an outside shell of material, where hydrogen was burning. In that outside shell, the carbon and hydrogen then mixed to create nitrogen.

As the nitrogen was produced, convection currents within the star began to distribute it throughout the star's body. Over time, the nitrogen left the star and flowed into space. In the case of GS 3073, this process lasted millions of years.

"The study also found that this nitrogen signature only appears in a specific mass range," the researchers noted. "Stars smaller than 1,000 solar masses, or larger than 10,000 solar masses, don't produce the right chemical pattern for the signature, suggesting a 'sweet spot' for this type of enrichment."

The big black hole mystery

Based on their models, the researchers further suggested that when these monster stars reach the end of their lives, they don't explode into supernovas. What happens next is instead a big collapse, generating some of the universe's earliest supermassive black holes.

Adding more fuel to this idea: GS 3073 does appear to have an actively feeding black hole at its center, "potentially the very remnant of one of these supermassive first stars," the statement noted. "If confirmed, this would solve two mysteries at once: where the nitrogen came from and how the black hole formed."

The origin of the universe's first supermassive black holes remains one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics. Some theories suggest they collapsed directly from ultra-dense clouds of gas shortly after the Big Bang and then formed galaxies around them; other theories point to more exotic explanations, such as dark matter interactions or the collapse of monster stars. Ultimately, more research is needed to solve this ancient puzzle.

A "super-puff" exoplanet is leaking a lot of helium into space, new observations show — and may be in the process of losing a lot of its atmosphere.

A large plume of helium gas was spotted evaporating from the giant planet, known as WASP-107b, according to research based on observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The results, published Monday (Dec. 1) in the journal Nature Astronomy, show that the gas spanned an area nearly five times the diameter of the planet and that the gas was visible speeding far ahead of the planet along WASP-107b's orbital path.

The research represents the first time JWST has "captured helium escape from this planet," lead author Vigneshwaran Krishnamurthy, a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University's Trottier Space Institute in Montreal, said in a statement.

The discovery could help researchers better understand how exoplanet atmospheres behave, especially in extreme star systems like WASP-107, where WASP-107b resides, the team said.

Planet puff-ball

WASP-107b was discovered in 2017 near a star about 210 light-years from Earth. (For comparison, the closest planets to us are about 4 light-years away.) WASP-107b is almost the same size as Jupiter, at 94% of the gas giant's diameter, but its mass is just 12% that of Jupiter. This extremely low density and large size place WASP-107b in the "super-puff" category of exoplanets.

Aside from its unusual density, WASP-107b is in an interesting spot: It is seven times closer to its star than Mercury is to the sun. In Earth's neighborhood, by contrast, rocky planets are closer to the sun and gas giants like Jupiter are farther away. That means scientists must come up with models to explain that difference.

They think WASP-107b, like Jupiter and Saturn, formed much farther from its star but something in the system — possibly another planet — forced WASP-107b to migrate closer to its star over time.

"WASP-107c, much farther out than WASP-107b, could have played a role in this migration," study co-author Caroline Piaulet-Ghorayeb, an exoplanet researcher now at the University of Chicago who completed her Ph.D. at the University of Montreal in 2024, said in the statement.

Once the planet got close enough to its star, the extreme heat of its new orbit began gutting the exoplanet's gassy atmosphere, the researchers explained. The new JWST observations confirmed the extent of the damage: The powerful telescope spotted the helium cloud of the exoplanet's atmosphere passing in front of the system's parent star about 1.5 hours before WASP-107b itself.

The researchers spotted several elements in WASP-107b's atmosphere that reveal more clues about the planet's complicated history. For example, there was more oxygen in the planet's atmosphere than would be predicted if it had formed close to its star, which provides more evidence that its migration was relatively recent.

JWST also found water in the planet's atmosphere — confirming previous observations from the Hubble Space Telescope — alongside traces of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and ammonia. But methane, which was predicted to be part of the planet's atmosphere due to its chemistry, was curiously absent.

Because JWST's instruments are sensitive enough to detect methane from afar, the researchers suggest other gases poor in methane must have instead been drawn up from deep in the planet's atmosphere due to "vigorous vertical mixing" driven by the heat of the star, Piaulet-Ghorayeb added.

While planets like Earth also have some atmospheric loss, it is not this extreme. Studying worlds like WASP-107b could help us understand how atmospheric escape works on planets like Venus, which lost water over the eons, the research team said in a statement from the University of Geneva.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may have discovered the most distant supermassive black hole ever seen. The enormous object, hosted by the galaxy GHZ2, is so far away that astronomers see it as it was just 350 million years after the Big Bang.

The team's research, uploaded to the preprint server arXiv Nov. 4 but not yet peer-reviewed, used observations from JWST's Near Infrared Spectrograph and Mid-Infrared Instrument. These instruments cover a wide range of wavelengths and can detect ultraviolet and optical light originally emitted by the distant galaxy, which has been stretched into the infrared due to the expansion of the universe.

"GHZ2 exists at a time when the universe was extremely young, leaving relatively little time for a supermassive black hole and its host galaxy to grow together," Oscar Chavez Ortiz, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin and the lead author of the study, told Live Science in an email. "In the local universe, black holes and galaxies clearly coevolve, but detecting such a system at this early epoch raises questions about how supermassive black holes gain mass so quickly."

There are two main hypotheses for how these supermassive black holes form so early, Chavez Ortiz said: They're either "light seeds" that grow extraordinarily fast, or "heavy seeds" that start with large masses, giving them a head start.

Secrets of the lines

Since GHZ2's discovery was reported in 2022, astronomers have used JWST to find many distant galaxies. However, GHZ2 stands out because its spectrum shows very intense "emission lines" — bright bands of light emitted by certain atoms or ions when their electrons get energized and then release energy at specific wavelengths. These lines carry clues about the processes powering GHZ2.

"We are observing emission lines that require a lot of energy to be produced, known as high-ionization lines," Jorge Zavala, an assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-author of the study, told Live Science in an email.

Zavala explained that the current understanding of gas ionization — heating of gas that turns atoms into ions by losing or gaining electrons — is based primarily on nearby star-forming regions and usually doesn't account for the intense high-ionization lines. These lines, and the relationship between them, are often found in active galactic nuclei (AGN), which contain actively feeding black holes at their centers, with much more energetic radiation present.

A crucial clue was the detection of the C IV λ1548 emission line, which comes from triply ionized carbon — that is, carbon atoms that have lost three electrons. "Removing three electrons requires an extremely intense radiation field, which is very difficult to achieve with stars alone," Chavez Ortiz said. An AGN naturally produces such high-energy photons. The strength of this line strongly suggested that GHZ2 might host an actively feeding black hole, which motivated the researchers to do an in-depth analysis.

A mixed system

Because GHZ2 is an unusual system that challenges existing models, the researchers had to develop detailed models to match its unique behavior and understand the contributions of both stars and the AGN to the galaxy's light. This process involved testing and improving the models repeatedly to ensure they accurately represented the galaxy's properties.

Their analysis revealed that while the visible-light spectral lines could be explained by star formation alone, the particularly strong carbon line required the presence of an AGN. This finding suggested that some of the galaxy's light shows contributions from a hungry supermassive black hole.

However, Zavala noted that GHZ2 lacked some other indicators of an AGN. This means the galaxy may be powered mostly by stars — if those stars were supermassive, with masses hundreds to thousands of times that of the sun, or if star formation in GHZ2 happened very differently from what we currently understand.

Another possibility is that the galaxy's light comes partly from normal stars and partly from more exotic sources, like supermassive stars or an AGN.

To further confirm the AGN activity, researchers plan to obtain more JWST observations to collect higher-resolution spectra of some emission lines. Additionally, observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array that cover spectral lines in the far-infrared could improve the sensitivity of the dataset.

If confirmed, GHZ2 would host the most distant supermassive black hole ever identified. Detecting signs of AGN activity in this galaxy offers a rare natural laboratory to test competing "light seed" and "heavy seed" models of black hole formation and growth just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

Astronomers using the James Webb telescope may have discovered some of the universe's first stars, and they may offer clues to how galaxies form. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and a phenomenon first predicted by Albert Einstein, the scientists spotted the early stars, known as Population III stars, in a distant cluster called LAP1-B, located 13 billion light-years from Earth. They described their results Oct. 27 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Population III stars, sometimes called dark stars, are theorized to be some of the first stars that formed after the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago. According to this theory, hydrogen and helium combined with dark matter, creating gargantuan stars a million times the mass of the sun and a billion times as bright as our star.

There are several reasons the team suspects the stars spotted by JWST are Population III, lead study author Eli Visbal, an associate professor and astrophysicist at the University of Toledo in Ohio, told Live Science in an email.

For example, the stars' spectra, which show their composition based on the light they absorb and emit, had emission lines suggesting lots of high-energy photons, which is consistent with Population III predictions. The spectra also suggested the stars are very large — each on the order of 100 solar masses — and the mass of the stars met some theoretical calculations.

"If indeed Pop III, this is the first detection of these primordial stars," Visbal told Live Science.

However, JWST was suspected to have seen Population III stars before, the team noted in the study. For example, peer-reviewed research in March 2024 suggested that the telescope had spotted some in the galaxy GN-z11 that formed only 430 million years after the universe itself.

The new study argues, however, that the detection of LAP1-B is the only one that fits three theoretical conditions for Population III stars: It formed in a low-metallicity (hydrogen and helium) environment with a temperature suitable to host star formation; the stars formed in low-mass clusters with only a few very large stars present; and the cluster meets mathematical conditions for the initial mass function, or how star masses were distributed among a population when they formed.

JWST was essential for the observations because its 6.5-meter (21 feet) mirror allows it to catch faint objects at incredible distances, Visbal said. But what helped LAP1-B pop into view was a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, which happens when a very massive object, such as a galaxy, bends space-time around it while a background object is in just the right spot. As light from the distant background object passes through the "warp" created by the foreground object, the background light is distorted into rings or arcs. This phenomenon is sometimes called an Einstein ring, as it confirms what Einstein suggested would happen more than a century ago.

In this case, LAP1-B became visible when a closer galaxy cluster, called MACS J0416, passed in front of it and "lensed” the light of LAP1-B.

JWST also allowed for observations of the emission lines from the stars, which were initially emitted in ultraviolet wavelengths but then stretched into infrared wavelengths due to the expansion of the universe, Visbal said. JWST is optimized for infrared observations, allowing the stars to be visible.

Aside from the novelty of the star finding, LAP1-B helps showcase how galaxies evolved, Visbal said. Because Population III stars are expected to form in small dark matter structures that also were building blocks for larger galaxies, "they teach us about the earliest stages of galaxy formation and evolution — for example, how metals pollute the initially pristine hydrogen and helium gas."

Astronomers have spotted a "rogue" planet gobbling gas and dust at a record rate, and they can't explain its baffling behavior.

Although many rogue planets, which float freely through space without orbiting a star, have been discovered before, this one — known as Cha 1107-7626 — appears to be the fastest-growing free-floating planet ever discovered, gorging at a peak rate of 6.6 billion tons (6 billion metric tons) of matter per second, according to observations with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The exoplanet's rapid growth spurt may help scientists learn more about the difference between large planets and small stars, the team reported Oct. 2 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"Our main motivation to study this kind of object is to understand whether these objects are former planets that have been ejected from their planetary system, or they have formed 'isolated' from the gravitational collapse of molecular cloud material, like stars," lead study author Víctor Almendros-Abad, an astronomer at the Palermo Astronomical Observatory in Italy, told Live Science in an email.

The team spotted an "accretion burst," which happens when a planet suddenly pulls in a lot of material from its surrounding disk of gas and dust. Cha 1107-7626 is always accreting from this source material, but the study shows that the accretion rate is not steady. In fact, in August 2025, the planet was accreting eight times faster than it was a few months before.

Accretion bursts suggest that rogue worlds may be like young stars, since these sudden bursts of eating have been observed in stars. But because rogue planets are so much smaller than stars, it's unclear where their formation pathways diverge.

"Accretion bursts have been known for quite some time; the first was discovered in the late 1930s, long before it was clear what we are witnessing," study co-author Alexander Scholz, a professor of astrophysics at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, told Live Science in an email. "Such events are now understood to play an important role in the assembly of stars. They also shape the environment in which planetary systems form, by heating the gas and dust nebula surrounding young stars.

"The relics of such bursts may be seen in the chemistry of meteorites in our own solar system," Scholz continued. "It is not clear if bursts happen to all young stars, and what triggers them. The discovery of a similar event in a planetary-mass object may be a clue that there is a universal mechanism behind accretion bursts. In this sense, our discovery will have a much wider impact."

Scientists have spotted more rogue planets in recent years, including a notable haul by JWST that discovered more than 500 of these worlds in a trapezoid-shaped spot within the Orion Nebula, a vast gas cloud noted for its star births.

Rogue planets remain hard to find, however, as they glow in infrared light (radiant energy) best visible in large telescopes such as JWST and VLT, Almendros-Abad said. The scientists hope VLT and JWST can look at more of these rogue planets, to learn whether they form like stars or planets. Almendros-Abad noted that the accretion parallels between stars and planets are not fully understood.

"One of the next steps is to understand how common these types of events are in 'rogue planets,'" he said. "This will tell us how important [accretion events] are in their evolution."

They're big, they appear early in the history of the universe and where they come from has long been a mystery. Ever since astronomers first detected the existence of supermassive black holes at the center of most galaxies, it has been difficult to fully explain their origin.

But a recent observation with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could help solve the riddle of how supermassive black holes grew so rapidly to become the early universe's goliaths.

The object QSO1 lies in the galaxy cluster Abell 2744 (also known as Pandora's Cluster). The mass in the cluster acts as a gravitational lens that can focus and alter the light from distant sources, making them appear both brighter and at multiple locations. The light from QSO1 was emitted when the universe was around 700 million years old (its current age is almost 14 billion years).

The black hole in QSO1 was first analyzed in February 2024, which revealed that the galaxy contained a black hole with a mass roughly equivalent to 50 million suns.

A recent follow-up study led by Ignas Juodžbalis from the University of Cambridge confirmed the original mass estimate and also showed unequivocally that QSO1 lacks a significant component of gas and stars. Instead of being a black hole that sits at the center of a galaxy, it's as if the black hole itself is dominating the system and the wider galaxy is missing.

"It's a very odd system," Marta Volonteri, a professor at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, said in an interview with LiveScience. "If there are more like that, it becomes really bizarre."

Volonteri is a world-leading expert on the formation of supermassive black holes and contributed to the analysis of the black hole's mass. "I double checked the results with my own code. There is very little room for any substantial mass in the system besides that of the black hole," she said.

In QSO1, the black hole's mass is about twice that of the surrounding gas and stars. In contrast, the black hole Sagittarius A*, which sits at the center of the Milky Way, has a mass that is only a tiny fraction of the total mass of the galaxy.

Mysterious little red dots

As JWST began gathering data in 2022, it revealed a surprising discovery: numerous compact, red-hued galaxies dubbed "little red dots" observed at epochs corresponding to roughly 500 million to 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.

Their exact nature is still a mystery, but these ancient systems seem to indicate that galaxies, black holes or both evolved earlier, and with greater masses or densities, than astronomers had previously believed.

Black holes can form when massive stars exhaust their nuclear fuel and collapse under their own gravity. At the dawn of the universe, these early black holes would have grown by feeding on a buffet of stars, gas clouds and other black holes. Yet when astronomers calculate how quickly such stellar-mass black holes could accrete matter, they find it difficult to explain how they could have grown into the cosmic behemoths observed by JWST.

One alternative scenario is that instead of being created from stars, some early-universe black holes could have been formed from the direct collapse of huge gas clouds with much larger masses. Such a scenario was supported by the discovery of UHZ-1, a black hole that displays the telltale signs of direct collapse according to a study led by Priyamvada Natarajan from Yale University.

But the system QSO1, one of the several hundred little red dots that astronomers have analyzed, seems to have formed in a different way.

"My co-authors suggested that its origin could be a primordial black hole, or it may be dark matter that has collapsed because of how it interacts with itself," Volonteri said. "In any case, the black hole came well before the ordinary matter, such as the gas and the stars."

Primordial black holes

In 1967, the Soviet physicists Yakov B. Zeldovich and Igor D. Novikov proposed that, for a brief moment after the Big Bang, some regions of the universe contained so much mass that they imploded into black holes. The idea was further developed by Stephen Hawking in 1971, and has since been investigated both theoretically and observationally by several astrophysicists.

These primordial black holes would not only get a head start in terms of their growth and size, but also sit dead center in the galaxies that form around them. "That the black hole in QSO1 grew so much without any star formation taking place points to a case in which it developed significantly faster than the galaxy," Volonteri said.

The question, then, is if the discovery of QSO1 solves the chicken-or-egg problem of which came into being first: the galaxy, or the black hole at its center?

"This is one object that is still being reviewed. I hope that all this analysis is correct, but it's very complex. But what we used to call exotic models are perhaps not so exotic anymore," Volonteri concluded.

Marta Volonteri was previously interviewed by the author for the book Facing Infinity: Black holes and our place on Earth, which contains more information about her work and the origin of supermassive black holes. Read an exclusive excerpt here.

If you own a small backyard telescope, there's a good chance you've seen the Cigar Galaxy (M82) with your own eyes. Not only is it relatively close to the Milky Way and one of the brightest galaxies in the night sky, but it's visible beside Bode's Galaxy (M81). A spiral galaxy about four times smaller than the Milky Way, M82 shines five times more brightly and forms stars at 10 times the rate, earning it the title of a starburst galaxy.

This image from the James Web Space Telescope (JWST) reveals a glowing core teeming with billions of stars. The shot is a follow-up to a close-up image published in 2024. Despite being a side-on view of M82, the photo shows its brilliant core exuding a blue-white glare, with red and orange dust clouds being pushed out above and below. The gas clouds contain cavities and ridges — details that are only possible to spot because of JWST's Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), which can see straight through them.

M82's core is a busy place, containing more than 100 super star clusters, some still being born within dense gas clouds. Each super star cluster hosts hundreds of thousands of stars. The reason for M82's burst of star formation is probably its neighbor, M81, whose gravity it has likely interacted with. As a result, gas from M81 has found its way into M82's center, spurring an uptick in star formation despite the galaxy's small size.

Scientists can also see the glow from plumes of organic molecules in this image. The broad plumes, which are 160 light-years across, are called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and are being pushed away from the galactic disk by powerful outflowing winds produced by M82's super star clusters.

For stargazers in the Northern Hemisphere, M81 and M82 are a spectacular sight in the northern sky during fall and winter. Both galaxies can be spotted as small, diffuse patches of light northwest of Dubhe — the bright star marking the lip of the Big Dipper's bowl. Through a small backyard telescope, these two galaxies next door appear together in the same field of view.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

After Christmas dinner in 2021, our family was glued to the television, watching the nail-biting launch of NASA's $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope. There had not been such a leap forward in telescope technology since Hubble was launched in 1990.

En route to its deployment, Webb had to successfully navigate 344 potential points of failure. Thankfully, the launch went better than expected, and we could finally breathe again.

Six months later, Webb's first images were revealed, of the most distant galaxies yet seen. However, for our team in Australia, the work was only beginning.

We would be using Webb's highest-resolution mode, called the aperture masking interferometer or AMI for short. It's a tiny piece of precisely machined metal that slots into one of the telescope's cameras, enhancing its resolution.

Our results on painstakingly testing and enhancing AMI are now released on the open-access archive arXiv in a pair of papers. We can finally present its first successful observations of stars, planets, moons and even black hole jets.

Working with an instrument a million miles away

Hubble started its life seeing out of focus — its mirror had been ground precisely, but incorrectly. By looking at known stars and comparing the ideal and measured images (exactly like what optometrists do), it was possible to figure out a "prescription" for this optical error and design a lens to compensate.

The correction required seven astronauts to fly up on the Space Shuttle Endeavor in 1993 to install the new optics. Hubble orbits Earth just a few hundred miles above the surface, and can be reached by astronauts.

By contrast, Webb is roughly 1 million miles (1.5 million km) away — we can't visit and service it, and need to be able to fix issues without changing any hardware.

This is where AMI comes in. This is the only Australian hardware on board, designed by astronomer Peter Tuthill.

It was put on Webb to diagnose and measure any blur in its images. Even nanometers of distortion in Webb's 18 hexagonal primary mirrors and many internal surfaces will blur the images enough to hinder the study of planets or black holes, where sensitivity and resolution are key.

AMI filters the light with a carefully structured pattern of holes in a simple metal plate, to make it much easier to tell if there are any optical misalignments.

Hunting blurry pixels

We wanted to use this mode to observe the birth places of planets, as well as material being sucked into black holes. But before any of this, AMI showed Webb wasn't working entirely as hoped.

At very fine resolution — at the level of individual pixels — all the images were slightly blurry due to an electronic effect: brighter pixels leaking into their darker neighbors.

This is not a mistake or flaw, but a fundamental feature of infrared cameras that turned out to be unexpectedly serious for Webb.

This was a dealbreaker for seeing distant planets many thousands of times fainter than their stars a few pixels away: my colleagues quickly showed that its limits were more than ten times worse than hoped.

So, we set out to correct it.

How we sharpened Webb's vision

In a new paper led by University of Sydney PhD student Louis Desdoigts, we looked at stars with AMI to learn and correct the optical and electronic distortions simultaneously.

We built a computer model to simulate AMI's optical physics, with flexibility about the shapes of the mirrors and apertures and about the colours of the stars.

We connected this to a machine learning model to represent the electronics with an "effective detector model" — where we only care about how well it can reproduce the data, not about why.

After training and validation on some test stars, this setup allowed us to calculate and undo the blur in other data, restoring AMI to full function. It doesn't change what Webb does in space, but rather corrects the data during processing.

It worked beautifully — the star HD 206893 hosts a faint planet and the reddest-known brown dwarf (an object between a star and a planet). They were known but out of reach with Webb before applying this correction. Now, both little dots popped out clearly in our new maps of the system.

This correction has opened the door to using AMI to prospect for unknown planets at previously impossible resolutions and sensitivities.

It works not just on dots

In a companion paper by University of Sydney PhD student Max Charles, we applied this to looking not just at dots — even if these dots are planets — but forming complex images at the highest resolution made with Webb. We revisited well-studied targets that push the limits of the telescope, testing its performance.

With the new correction, we brought Jupiter's moon Io into focus, clearly tracking its volcanoes as it rotates over an hour-long timelapse.

As seen by AMI, the jet launched from the black hole at the centre of the galaxy NGC 1068 closely matched images from much-larger telescopes.

Finally, AMI can sharply resolve a ribbon of dust around a pair of stars called WR 137, a faint cousin of the spectacular Apep system, lining up with theory.

The code built for AMI is a demo for much more complex cameras on Webb and its follow-up, Roman space telescope. These tools demand an optical calibration so fine, it's just a fraction of a nanometre — beyond the capacity of any known materials.

Our work shows that if we can measure, control, and correct the materials we do have to work with, we can still hope to find Earth-like planets in the far reaches of our galaxy.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is celebrating Halloween with a stunning image showing never-before-seen details of the Red Spider Nebula.

The image, snapped by JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), shows dust and gas being shed by a dying star to form a planetary nebula, its filaments twisting and stretching like the limbs of a cosmic arachnid.

Lobes, which were formed by this outgassed material, buffeted by the radiation of a hidden companion star, and inflated into massive bubbles over thousands of years, stretch across the image. The researchers reported their findings Oct. 28 in The Astrophysical Journal.

"The legs are hairy and shine with molecular hydrogen emission, which have escaped from the torus," Mikako Matsuura, an astrophysicist at Cardiff University and a co-investigator on the program that took the image, said in an email statement. "It is still unclear why the outflows appear 'hairy'. One possibility is that the outflow from the primary star was not continuous, perhaps because mass transfer from the companion star affected the timing of the outflow."

For most of their lives, stars burn by fusing hydrogen into helium. But once they have exhausted their hydrogen fuel, they begin fusing helium into even heavier elements, leading to a massive increase in energy output that causes them to swell into red giants hundreds or even thousands of times their original size.

The star in the Red Spider Nebula (NGC 6537) has already transformed into a red giant and is currently shedding its outer material to expose its white-hot core. The ultraviolet light from the star's embering heart is ionizing this gas and dust, causing it to glow.

Stunning images such as this one offer scientists rare insights into the possible future of our own solar system, after our sun transforms into a red giant in 5 billion years' time. After running out of fuel, our star too will accelerate outward as a red giant, consuming Mercury, Venus and possibly even Earth and Mars in the process.

But if our planet is spared from the sun's transformation, it could find itself in a scene much like this one, drifting out along the dewy limbs of a perishing cosmic spider.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have spotted a very bright and mysterious object that could be a galaxy that emerged just 100 million years after the Big Bang, which would make it the universe's earliest known galaxy, a new study suggests.

Alternatively, Capotauro may be an extraordinary brown dwarf (a "failed star" that is more massive than the largest gas giant planets but not large enough to sustain nuclear fusion in its core) that lives on the outer edges of the Milky Way while smoldering at a mere 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius).

Capotauro's exact identity is not certain yet, the researchers wrote in the paper, which was posted Sept. 1 to the preprint server arXiv but has not been peer-reviewed yet.

"Capotauro, whatever it is, seems really interesting and promising," co-author Giovanni Gandolfi, an astrophysicist at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy, told Live Science.

Capotauro was originally spotted by Gandolfi and his team during a previous study, in which they tried to identify very old galaxies in JWST observations. But the lack of fine-grained data made it impossible to narrow down the object's identity, which Gandolfi said was like having a slither of DNA at a crime scene but too many matches in the FBI database to be helpful.

Then, in March, JWST released more data on Capotauro that was like getting a partial fingerprint, thus allowing them to whittle down the list to just a handful of suspects, Gandolfi said.

To determine what Capotauro could be, the team used images taken by JWST's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) at seven wavelengths as part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) survey to measure Capotauro's brightness. The object was detected only at the two longest NIRCam wavelengths.

Then, they used limited, but more fine-grained data from JWST's Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) to get a more accurate picture of Capotauro's age and temperature.

Combining the NIRCam and NIRSpec data, the researchers used models to test three possible galaxy configurations, as well as a scenario in which Capotauro might instead be a brown dwarf on the outer rim of the Milky Way. They also tested a range of other possible scenarios, such as the object being a very odd young galaxy or a peculiar exoplanet.

The results were inconclusive, meaning the team could not decisively determine Capotauro's identity. However, they identified the two most likely options.

Under the early-galaxy interpretation, Capotauro was consistently found to have formed around 100 million years after the Big Bang — pushing the age of the oldest known galaxy back by around 200 million years. It was estimated to be gigantic, at over a billion solar masses.

The other possibility is that Capotauro is a very unusual brown dwarf. If this is the case, Capotauro would be the coldest and farthest known brown dwarf in our galaxy, at over seven light-years away and only 300 kelvins (80 F, or 27 C), the researchers wrote in the study. If Capotauro is a pristine brown dwarf, Gandolfi said, scientists now have the chance to investigate the formation of our galaxy.

Both possibilities are "very exciting" because they would challenge what we thought we knew about our own galaxy and how galaxies form and evolve in general, Gandolfi added.

Muhammad Latif, an astrophysicist at United Arab Emirates University who was not involved in the research, said Capotauro is "one of the most puzzling discoveries" from JWST to date.

"It's a very intriguing object in the sense that whatever the way you interpret it, it basically is kind of pushing the boundaries of our knowledge to the edge," he told Live Science.

More precise data on the light emitted by Capotauro is needed to pinpoint its exact properties, Latif said. The team has submitted a request for JWST to gather more data on this mysterious object, Gandolfi added, and is scanning other areas of the universe for similar-looking objects.

Like cosmic toddlers, galaxies in the young universe were messy and had difficulty settling down, a new study shows.

Using the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists peered at more than 250 galaxies in the early universe. The research team charted the movement of gas long ago, when the universe was growing up — between 800 million and 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. (The cosmos is roughly 13.8 billion years old.)

Their findings, published Tuesday (Oct. 21) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, show that galaxies were restless in their youth.

"The bulk of the galaxy population is undergoing a turbulent phase of its evolutionary history," lead author Lola Danhaive, a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge's Kavli Institute for Cosmology, told Live Science in an email.

Unlike in past studies, Danhaive explained, the team targeted less-massive galaxies and uncovered what they called "messy kinematics," meaning the galaxies the researchers studied are not stable, rotating disks like the Milky Way and its neighbors.

Turbulence during earlier phases of the universe's history was much higher than scientists previously thought, Danhaive added, because earlier studies were biased toward larger and more ordered galaxies, which are easier to spot in telescopes than the smaller galaxies targeted in the new study.

"We find evidence that this turbulence in the [galaxy] disk is caused by high amounts of gas, which fuels intense star formation and drives gravitational instabilities," Danhaive said.

Moreover, the researchers charted how galaxies changed from these chaotic structures into the more regular patterns seen in mature galaxies, providing an unprecedented view of how galaxies grew from youth to maturity.

"At early times, galaxies are undergoing a turbulent phase of assembly, where strong bursts of star formation and high amounts of gas disrupt the ordered motions of the gas disk," Danhaive said. "At later times, galaxies grow their mass and become more stable."

Structures like the Milky Way formed more recently, in the past few billion years, as the available gas was taken up by stars and diminished in the galaxy overall. Less free-floating gas allows mature galaxies to grow and change more smoothly than in youthful times.

The study would not have been possible without the JWST, which is perched in a distant, gravitationally stable spot in space far from the stray light of Earth and the moon. The infrared telescope can peer deeper into space than any of its predecessors, and routinely discovers galaxies considered to be the earliest in the known universe. Danhaive said the observatory, paired with simulations, is helping researchers better understand "bursty" star formation and how gas influences a galaxy's disk.

"Overall, our work opens a window into the dynamics of early galaxy formation," she said. Next up, the team plans to study the inflows and outflows of gas in individual galaxies by tracing how gas was chemically enriched.

The researchers expect that inflowing gas will be less enriched, or "pristine," while outflowing gas will have more chemical components, thanks to contributions from individual stars within the galaxy. Examining how gas flows throughout the galaxy may allow researchers to see why some galaxies rotate faster than others, for example.

"There is so much more to uncover with JWST's amazing capabilities, and we look forward to exploring many more aspects of early galaxy formation," Danhaive said.

New images from the James Webb telescope have captured previously unseen details of the gargantuan jets shooting out of the famous black hole M87* — the first-ever black hole to be directly imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope.

The new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images, published Sept. 22 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, have also revealed the clearest views yet of the massive counter-jet that's ricocheting through space in the opposite direction, the study authors found.

The jet of subatomic particles spewing out of the supermassive black hole at the center of the gigantic galaxy Messier 87 (M87), located 54 million light-years from Earth, is catapulting through space at almost the speed of light. Previous radio wavelength observations from the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico revealed that the jet is shaped like a double-helix and is about 8,000 light years long.

Although supermassive black hole jets are somewhat common, "the M87 jet is special in the sense that it is fairly close by (on astronomical scales), and very bright across the spectrum," study co-author Jan Röder, an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain, told Live Science in an email. This makes it "an ideal laboratory to study jet physics," he said.

The black hole M87* is a supermassive black hole with an equivalent mass of about 6.5 billion suns. It was the first black hole to be directly photographed by the Event Horizon Telescope — an array of eight globally linked radio telescopes — in 2019.

The black hole and its jets have been frequently studied since then, with recent research finding that the cosmic monster is spinning at close to 80% of the cosmic speed limit, and that the magnetic fields surrounding the black hole have changed dramatically in just a few short years.

Previous research has peeked at the jet using various electromagnetic wavelengths, including radio waves, visible light, ultraviolet radiation, X-rays and gamma rays. But its structure at the infrared scale, which Röder said is key for connecting the radio and visible light images, was unknown.

Now, Röder and his team have used infrared images of M87 taken in June 2024 by JWST's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to study the jet like never before. First, the team isolated the jet in the images by modelling the galaxy and then scrubbing away its light emissions; as well as any extra stars, dust and background galaxies. They then used these cleaned images to identify all the individual features of the jet at four wavelengths of infrared light.

The two shorter-wavelength images were particularly high definition, and captured one of the brightest sections of the jet, called HST-1, near the galaxy's core. Previous research modelled HST-1 using X-ray data and found it was made up of two light emitting regions. These images are the first direct observations confirming this structure, Röder said.

The two longer-wavelength images show a faint C-shaped counter-jet spurting from the core in the opposite direction of the main jet. While the counter-jet also appears in radio wave photos, Röder said that the clarity achieved in the infrared images was "very exciting."

Continuing to snap photos at different wavelengths will help scientists to understand how the jet interacts with its cosmic surroundings and what the jet and its opposite are made of. "With every new observation, we inch closer to the complete picture," Röder added.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed a hidden "doomed" star that could help solve a giant astrophysical mystery.

The star is a massive red supergiant, which JWST snapped just before the star exploded in a fiery supernova. Massive red supergiants should, in theory, cause most supernovas, but they're rarely observed. The latest JWST observation, described in a new study published Wednesday (Oct. 8) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, adds weight to the idea that these giants are often obscured by clouds of dust.

"For multiple decades, we have been trying to determine exactly what the explosions of red supergiant stars look like," study lead author Charlie Kilpatrick, a research assistant professor studying massive stars at Northwestern University in Illinois, said in a statement. "Only now, with JWST, do we finally have the quality of data and infrared observations that allow us to say precisely the exact type of red supergiant that exploded and what its immediate environment looked like."

Stars around the size of our sun swell up near the end of their lifecycles to become red giants before going supernova. Red supergiants are massive stars on the verge of detonating, typically measuring hundreds or thousands of times larger than our sun.

The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae first detected the supernova from the newly imaged supergiant in June. The supernova, officially named SN 2025pht, came from a galaxy called NGC 1637, which is located 38 million light-years from Earth — pretty close for something in space. The authors of the new study identified the supergiant's source star (its progenitor) by comparing historical Hubble Space Telescope data to new JWST images of NGC 1637 taken before and after the explosion.

Researchers like Kilpatrick have suggested that the most massive aging stars might also be the dustiest, so their light is blocked. This possible explanation tracks with the new JWST observation. The star shone about 100,000 times brighter than our sun, but the team estimated that its dust was so thick that this light was made more than 100 times dimmer, according to the statement.

The dust was also particularly effective at blocking shorter, blue wavelengths of light. Fortunately, JWST's powerful infrared detection could see the longer red wavelengths, providing an unprecedented detailed look at a supergiant on the brink of going supernova.

"SN2025pht is surprising because it appeared much redder than almost any other red supergiant we've seen explode as a supernova," Kilpatrick said. "That tells us that previous explosions might have been much more luminous than we thought because we didn't have the same quality of infrared data that JWST can now provide."

The second most distant object ever spotted by the James Webb telescope may be a 'dark star' powered by dark matter rather than nuclear fusion.

By looking at the wavelengths of light picked up by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers have identified four dark star candidates — with one seemingly possessing a “smoking gun” helium absorption signature, the researchers reported in a study published Sept. 30 in the journal PNAS.

First hypothesized in 2007, dark stars are believed to be among some of the first stars — called Population III stars — to form after the Big Bang. According to the theory, they are made when collapsing hydrogen and helium, which on their own would form a black hole, mix with dark matter. Dark stars are thought to be extraordinarily massive and bright, reaching one million times the mass of the sun and burning one billion times as bright.

"Our initial name 'dark star' is a misnomer," study co-author Katherine Freese, a professor of physics at The University of Texas at Austin who proposed the dark star hypothesis, told Live Science. "They're neither made [entirely] of dark matter nor are they dark."

Finding dark stars could explain some of the very puzzling objects that JWST has spotted in the early universe, such as the giant supermassive black holes that formed impossibly fast, Freese said. It would also provide insights into the nature of dark matter. "It's a probe, not just a new kind of star," she said, "so these candidates are very encouraging to us."

To spot the potential dark star candidates, the team trawled through observations from the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES). They focused on data collected by the Near InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec): an instrument measuring the individual wavelengths of light coming from celestial objects to learn about their temperatures, masses and chemical fingerprints.

The researchers set various criteria in their search: the signals needed to be no younger than redshift 10 (a redward stretching of the universe’s ancient light corresponding to 500 million years after the Big Bang), could only contain hydrogen and helium, and had to be from a single object.

This led them to four dark star candidates: JADES-GS-z11-0, JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z14-0 and JADES-GS-z14-1. JADES-GS-z14-0 is the second most distant object observed by JWST to date.

Signals from the first stars

Models of each candidate showed that all four could plausibly be dark stars, perhaps even supermassive dark stars.

The team also found hints of the “smoking gun signature” for supermassive dark stars in the JADES-GS-z14-0 wavelength data — singly ionized helium atoms absorbing light particles with a wavelength of 1640 angstroms (an angstrom is one hundred-million times smaller than a centimeter).

"No other known high redshift objects are expected to produce such an absorption feature," the authors wrote in the study, adding weight to their suggestion that JADES-GS-z14-0 is a dark star.

The team were surprised to discover, however, that the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile had detected JADES-GS-z14-0 emitting oxygen, an element only produced by nuclear fusion powered stars. "That worries me a little bit," Freese said.

The team are now running simulations to determine how much oxygen is permitted before a dark star is no longer able to form, study co-author Cosmin Ilie, a physicist at Colgate University in New York, told Live Science. "Logic tells me that there should be sort of a transition," he said.

Dark stars remain controversial and their existence is by no means accepted. "The majority of the Pop III star community actually doesn't think that dark matter burners [dark stars] can form," Daniel Whalen, a cosmologist at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. who was not involved in the research, told Live Science.

In fact, Whalen said that a "huge issue" with this research is that it did not differentiate between dark stars and supermassive primordial stars. "That's the elephant in the room really here," he said.

Although the dark star candidates are more massive than most supermassive primordial stars, their wavelength data needs to be compared for both star types to rule out supermassive primordial stars, Whalen explained.

In response to this criticism, Ilie said that because supermassive primordial stars don't live as long as dark stars, if many suitable signatures are identified they are statistically more likely to be dark stars. That means many more observations are needed to settle this mystery.

Meanwhile, Freese said that the team is working on automating the search for dark stars in the JWST data "so we don't have to do anything except keep our eyes open."

Astronomers have observed a gigantic cosmic "contrail" in a distant galaxy. The trail of gas and dust may have been churned out by a passing massive black hole, although there are other possible causes, scientists report in a new study.

The contrail was spotted in the spiral galaxy NGC 3627, located roughly 31 million light-years from our solar system in the constellation Leo.

Although contrails have been previously identified in the Milky Way, NGC 3627's is the most clearly defined contrail ever discovered and is "remarkable for its sheer size," study co-author Mengke Zhao, a doctoral student in astronomy at Nanjing University in China, told Live Science in an email. The contrail is roughly 20,000 light-years long — about one-fifth the diameter of our entire galaxy — and extremely narrow, at only 650 light-years wide.

Zhao and co-author Guang-Xing Li stumbled upon the galactic contrail when analyzing data collected by the Physics at High Angular Resolution of Nearby Galaxies (PHANGS) survey. Using a range of telescopes, including the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, this survey aims to study how gas and star formation influences, and is influenced by, galaxy structure and evolution. While the PHANGS-JWST data revealed that NGC 3627's contrail contains dust particles, the PHANGS-ALMA data suggested it was also rich in carbon monoxide.

The contrail is a faint, linear tail of gas and dust that appears distinct from the galaxy's two spiral arms. Based on a theoretical model Li co-developed in 2021, Zhao and Li think a massive compact object, like a black hole, was most likely responsible for creating it. The model suggests that as the object flew through the galactic disk, it squeezed out the gas, leaving behind the contrail marking its passage. The tremendous turbulence within NGC 3627's contrail supports this model.

The contrail's features allowed the researchers to estimate that the compact object was about 10 million solar masses and was zipping past at a breakneck speed of 186 miles per second (300 kilometers per second) — 50% faster than the current speed record for a spacecraft, held by the Parker Solar Probe. Additional calculations indicate the contrail formed 20 million years ago, relatively recently in astronomical terms. (The Milky Way is more than 13 billion years old, for comparison).

Although the researchers suggested the compact object could be an enormous black hole, they noted that it could also be the dense nucleus of a dwarf galaxy.

"Currently, with the available data, we cannot definitively distinguish between these two possibilities," Zhao said. "The predicted mass fits both scenarios. A direct detection of the object itself is very challenging — if it's a faint dwarf galaxy, it would be too dim to see easily at NGC 3627's distance. Future deep optical surveys or very high-resolution ALMA observations might one day reveal a counterpart."

The researchers also suggested that mysterious red and compact objects known as "little red dots" may also be responsible, although they haven't worked out exactly how.

Zhao and Li plan to continue studying the contrail and will search the PHANGS observations for more of these streams.

"Understanding their evolution and how common they are could tell us a lot about the population of massive dark objects flying through galactic disks," Zhao said.

The study, which hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, is available as a preprint on the arXiv server.

Editor's note: This article was updated at 11:00 a.m. ET on Oct. 9 to correct a typo. The constellation Leo is 31 million light-years away, not 31 light-years away, as was previously written.

As telescopes peer into the universe, they sometimes see quirks of nature that magnify faraway objects. These eight galaxies recently imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) appear stretched, warped or even bent into perfect circles.

The odd shapes aren't camera tricks. They're caused by a cosmic effect called gravitational lensing, which turns massive galaxies into natural magnifying glasses.

Imagine space as a stretchy fabric. When a massive object, such as a galaxy, sits on that fabric, it bends the space around it. When light from a more distant galaxy passes through this warped space, its path curves. When the alignment is just right, that background galaxy's light is distorted into arcs or rings. The effect can create a glowing circle of light called an Einstein ring, named after Albert Einstein, who predicted this strange phenomenon more than 100 years ago. However, partial arcs and rings are more common.

Gravitational lensing helps astronomers see farther and clearer than ever before. These lenses magnify and amplify light from very distant galaxies that would otherwise be invisible. They also allow scientists to measure the mass of galaxies, including mysterious dark matter that can't be seen directly.

These spectacular new deep-field galaxy images come from a project called COSMOS-Web, one of the largest observing programs carried out with JWST. Scientists spent 255 hours pointing the telescope at more than 42,000 galaxies and found more than 400 possible examples of Einstein rings. The eight here are some of the most dramatic.

Perhaps the standout is the second image along the top. It shows COSJ100024+015334, a perfect circle that reveals a galaxy as it existed when the universe was just a billion years old — a fraction of its current estimated age (more than 13 billion years old).

Some of the galaxies had been seen before with the Hubble Space Telescope, but JWST's sharper infrared vision reveals details that were completely hidden until now. Others are brand-new discoveries, including galaxies made red by dust and distance.

The rare alignments that create Einstein rings allow astronomers to study the building blocks of galaxies, star clusters and exploding stars. These windows into the distant past reveal how galaxies formed and how dark matter shaped the cosmos in its early years.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Why it's so special: Stars in the Milky Way galaxy are born in huge molecular clouds. The most massive is Sagittarius B2, which is just a few hundred light-years from our the galaxy's central black hole (called Sagittarius A*). This black hole is much more bountiful than you might first think — it has 10% of the galactic center's gas, but accounts for about half of the region's ongoing star formation. Why star formation is so disproportionate within the galactic center region is a conundrum for scientists.

Cue the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which recently observed Sagittarius B2 in two wavelengths of light to help astronomers find out why. This breathtaking new image (above) of the molecular cloud comes from the JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). In it, we see stars shine brightly between orange clouds of gas and dust shining in near-infrared light.

However, even within the infrared spectrum, the difference in what can be seen is considerable, as proven by another image of the cloud by the JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

The MIRI image is entirely different, revealing the region's dust clouds illuminated by its stars. It shows pink and purple clouds surrounded by very dark regions studded with stars. The JWST cannot see everything:. Even its infrared vision can't penetrate the densest clouds, which remain dark and opaque in the MIRI image. Within those regions, hidden from view, are the raw ingredients for stars.

Why Sagittarius B2 is so much more productive than the rest of the galactic center remains puzzling, but there are clues. On the right-hand side of the MIRI image is a very bright, red region known to be rich in molecular material. It could hold the key to why the cloud outpaces the star production of the entire galactic center, potentially reshaping theories of how galaxies grow and evolve. Scientists plan to use Webb's new data on Sagittarius B2 to figure out how long it has been forming stars and whether a specific event triggered its prolific activity.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Astronomers have discovered a new object that could help shed light on mysterious "little red dots" that were first spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2022.

The newfound object, dubbed "the Cliff," suggests that the little red dots represent a totally new class of cosmic objects known as a "black hole star," the researchers say. This newly hypothesized object would essentially be a black hole feeding so rapidly that it lights up the thick cocoon of gas surrounding it, making it glow like a star.

Previously, astronomers had proposed alternative explanations for these tiny red objects. Initially, they were thought to be massive galaxies from the early universe, and later, they were linked to actively feeding supermassive black holes.

However, all of these theories are still evolving, so it's unclear whether the dots are exotic objects or simply a stage in the growth of galaxies or black holes. When they were first discovered, little red dots were dubbed "universe breakers" because they seemed too old to exist in the first few billion years of the universe. Therefore, astronomers looked beyond the standard types of known objects to find an explanation for what they might be.

They proposed two models. "One possibility is that Little Red Dots are extremely massive and compact galaxies with intense star formation, leading to very large stellar densities in their cores,"said Fabio Pacucci, an astrophysicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who was not involved in the new study. This scenario suggests that little red dots are tiny-but-dense galaxies and rich in stars and that they involve exotic, never-before-seen processes.

"The other possibility is that they host massive black holes at their centers, often appearing 'overmassive' compared to the stellar mass of their galaxies," he told Live Science in an email. In both cases, the redness would be due to the enormous dust surrounding the object.

The second explanation would mean that little red dots are galaxies that are powered by a massive black hole at their centers, like an active galactic nucleus (AGN). These black hole-fueled galaxies would be nothing like the other type of AGNs found in the early universe, known as quasars — extremely bright objects that are powered by large supermassive black holes and are easily detectable because they are not blocked by dust. The connection between these two types of populations remains unclear.

"Both explanations push the limits of our current understanding of early galaxy evolution," Pacucci said.

A "Cliff"-hanger

In the new study, published Sept. 10 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, a team of astronomers led by Anna de Graaff of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy looked at a peculiar little red dot that existed 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang.

This little red dot, whose light took almost 12 billion years to reach us, was discovered among many other little red dots identified in the Red Unknowns: Bright Infrared Extragalactic Survey (RUBIES) obtained with JWST.

In the light of this object, the researchers noticed a very sharp jump in the brightness called the Balmer break. While this kind of rise is common in the light of different objects, the kind of sharpness seen in this object's light could not be explained by massive galaxies or typical active galactic nuclei, researchers found. They identified it as an exaggerated version of a little red dot and dubbed it "the Cliff" for its sharp rise in the spectrum.

This unusually strong feature made astronomers wonder if they had seen something entirely new. The brightness of the object suggested a very energetic source, and the Balmer break originates from dense hydrogen gas at a specific temperature, de Graaff explained. These two hints led to the "black hole star" hypothesis.

"Black hole stars are [feeding] massive black holes that are surrounded by dense gas," de Graaff explained. When black holes accrete surrounding matter, they emit a lot of light, and therefore heat the gas, making it glow and thus look like a star.

"The key difference, of course, is that normal stars are powered by nuclear fusion, which is not happening here," de Graaff said. A black hole star can be thought of as a hot object wrapped inside an ultrathick blanket.

"The 'black hole star' hypothesis is certainly intriguing," Pacucci said. "This work is interesting because it tries to bridge unexplained observational features of Little Red Dots with such theoretical ideas."

Other little red dots may have similar signatures to the Cliff that may have gone undetected due to observational limitations, Pacucci said. However, the black hole star hypothesis is still at the beginning stage. Many more observations would be necessary to test the robustness of this scenario, and monitoring of these objects over time would help distinguish scenarios, Pacucci noted.

"We are not sure yet how they evolve into the black hole population that we see today," de Graaff noted. "Because the number of little red dots decreases toward later cosmic times, it must be a short-lived phase." Next, the team will use JWST to study brighter little red dots to understand the detailed structure of black hole stars.

If little red dots are, in fact, black hole stars, it could solve another puzzle. If black hole stars could grow at extremely rapid rates, it could explain the emergence of supermassive black holes very early in the universe.

The true nature of little red dots remains a mystery. If more cocooned black holes are discovered in the universe, researchers can find out if the little red dots are truly exotic black hole stars, a phase in a massive black hole's growth, or simply a stage of galaxy evolution.

The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered strange "dark beads "above a four-armed star pattern in Saturn's atmosphere. The surprising structures are unlike anything scientists have seen before, and they're not sure what they are.

The unusual features were discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST's) Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) as it peered into the gas giant's atmosphere above the hexagonal storm that swirls at the planet's north pole.

The astronomers expected to see emissions across broad bands of the infrared spectrum in the atmospheric layers above the vortex. Yet what they noticed instead were dark, bead-like features — separated by vast distances yet possibly interconnected — drifting slowly in the charged plasma of the planet's ionosphere, and a lopsided star-shape structure in the stratosphere beneath. They published their findings Aug. 28 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

"The results came as a complete surprise," Tom Stallard, a professor of astronomy at Northumbria University in the U.K., said in a statement. "These features were completely unexpected and, at present, are completely unexplained."

Saturn's Hexagon was first discovered in 1980 by NASA's Voyager spacecraft and imaged in fine detail by the Cassini spacecraft, which orbited the planet from 2004 to 2017. It rises as an 18,000-mile-wide (29,000 kilometers) six-sided tower whirling above the planet's surface, making a complete rotation roughly once every 10 hours.

Scientists believe that the hexagon is driven by a jet stream circling the planet's pole, and owes its unique shape to the properties of the gases in Saturn's atmosphere. Yet the exact reasons it has this flow and shape aren't known for certain; and neither is the behavior of the upper atmosphere above it, due to the very weak emissions coming from it.

To investigate, the astronomers focused JWST's NIRSpec instrument on Saturn's ionosphere and stratosphere, located 684 miles (1,100 km) and 373 miles (600 km) above the planet's nominal surface, respectively.

Related: Saturn will be at its biggest and brightest on Sept. 21 — here's how to see it

Over 10 hours, the telescope tracked positively-charged hydrogen molecules (H3+, involved in many reactions in the planet's atmosphere) across Saturn's ionosphere and methane molecules throughout its ionosphere, revealing the strange structures.

"We think that the dark beads may result from complex interactions between Saturn's magnetosphere and its rotating atmosphere, potentially providing new insights into the energy exchange that drives Saturn's aurora," Stallard said.

The asymmetric star pattern, meanwhile, may somehow be tied to the hexagonal storm pattern, he said.

"Tantalisingly, the darkest beads in the ionosphere appear to line up with the strongest star-arm in the stratosphere, but it's not clear at this point whether they are actually linked or whether it's just a coincidence," he added.

To understand what could be causing the features, and their effects on Saturn's atmosphere, the team hopes to conduct followup observations with JWST. Saturn is currently at its equinox, meaning the patterns could change drastically as the sun shifts across the planet's face. On Sept. 21, the ringed planet will also be at its closest point to Earth — the best time to observe Saturn with telescopes and to attempt to parse its many mysteries.

Sweeping wisps of fuchsia form an ethereal backdrop to millions of bright white pinpricks in a new image made from Gaia Space Telescope data. The glorious image is a peek into the vibrant cosmic kindergartens for newborn stars, which was previously hidden from view.

These are reddish-pink nebulas and sparkling stars in the star-forming regions of the Milky Way, made as part of the three-dimensional map of stars up to 4000 light-years from the sun.

Within the collection of 44 million "ordinary" stars Gaia captured lies 87 O-type stars — rare infant stars, which are both extremely massive and hot. They emit bright ultraviolet light that oozes so much energy that the rays blast electrons off of any hydrogen atoms they hit, ionizing them. This process creates a cloud of charged hydrogen gas around the O stars, called HII regions.

Scientists can look for patches of this ionized gas to identify where the starry seedbeds reside within the galaxy. They can also see how far the impacts of the O stars reach.

Astronomers already had a good idea of what these nurseries looked like while peering at them from Earth, but how they looked from other directions was a blindspot. Using the 1 billion pixel camera of the Gaia Space Telescope, which was launched Dec. 19, 2013 and remained operational until Jan 15, 2024, scientists made a 3D map of these regions.

Now, anyone can sweep through the Milky Way and get a glimpse of these stellar nurseries from various perspectives, the European Space Agency (ESA) wrote in a description of the image. The map includes the Gum Nebula, the North American Nebula and the California Nebula. ESA also released a video to accompany the image, showing a three-dimensional tour of the newly mapped regions.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

A craggy mountain peak, a tower, perhaps even a finger — in this new celestial dreamscape from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), something seems to be pointing at a cluster of bright stars above, as if a stargazing session were going on deep in the Milky Way.

This is Pismis 24, a small open star cluster at the core of the Lobster Nebula in the constellation Scorpius. This vast region of interstellar gas and dust is one of the closest sites to the solar system where our galaxy's most massive and extreme stars burn fast and die young.

The orange and brown craggy peaks are huge spires of gas and dust, the European Space Agency wrote in a description of the image. The tallest, in the center of the image, is 5.4 light-years from base to tip — as wide as about 200 solar systems placed side by side out to Neptune's orbit. Erosion within these spires is caused by powerful stellar winds and ultraviolet radiation from the massive newborn stars in the star cluster above. It's all part of the process — as the gas is eroded and compressed by young stars' radiation, new stars are born within the spires.

It's a self-sustaining nursery, but there's nothing ordinary about the stars in Pismis 24, which are among the most massive known stars in the galaxy. The brightest star in the cluster, Pismis 24-1, was once thought to be a single star with a mass of 200 to 300 suns. That's almost twice the generally accepted upper mass limit for stars.

However, in 2006, the Hubble Space Telescope found that Pismis 24-1 is actually at least two separate stars orbiting each other. At 74 and 66 solar masses, respectively, the two stars remain among the most massive and luminous stars in the Milky Way. Their intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds have produced the dusty dreamscape captured in infrared by JWST's Near Infrared Camera.

As with all of JWST's images, there's a color code to understand before you can fully appreciate what you're seeing. Astronomers assign different color filters to different wavelengths of light: Cyan is hot, ionized hydrogen gas; orange is dust; deep red is cooler and denser hydrogen; and white is starlight scattered by dust. The darker, blacker regions show gas and dust so thick that even JWST's infrared sensors cannot penetrate it.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Science advances through data that don't fit our current understanding. At least that was Thomas Kuhn's theory in his famous On the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. So scientists should welcome new data that challenges their understanding of how the universe works. A recent paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) might just had found some data that can do that. It looked at an exoplanet around a millisecond pulsar and found its atmosphere is made up of almost entirely pure carbon.

This type of pulsar, PSR J2322-2650, is known as a "black widow" system, as it powers its high energy outbursts by stealing material from a neighboring star. In this case, that neighboring star has likely been degraded to a "hot Jupiter" companion planet that orbits its parent neutron star every 7.8 hours. A typical "black widow" formation process has two steps - one where the neutron star (which in this case is also a pulsar) steals the material, and a second step where it blasts its companion with high energy gamma radiation, ripping off most of the companion star's outer layers and resulting in a Jupiter-sized exoplanet composed mainly of helium.

The exoplanet around PSR J2322-2650, known as PSR J2322-2650b, does fit the description of a Jupiter-sized planet that seems to have the same density as what would be expected if it was made up primarily of helium. However, its atmosphere is unlike any other black widow companion ever seen. According to the spectrographic reports from JWST, its atmosphere is composed mainly of elemental carbon, taking the form of tricarbon (C3) or dicarbon (C2).

Usually those types of elements are found in the tails of comets, or in actual flames here on Earth. Their presence in a planet's atmosphere, especially in such abundant quantities, is new to science.

Related: Will the James Webb telescope lead us to alien life? Scientists say we're getting closer than ever.

Another interesting thing about the planet's atmosphere is the difference between the day and night side. On the dayside, which is always facing the pulsar since the planet is tidally locked, temperatures can reach above 2000 C and there are very clear chemical signatures. However, on the night side, there were almost no features at all, suggesting that side of the planet is covered in soot or something similar that doesn't have any distinct features.

To further prove how strange this planet's atmosphere is, the researchers calculated the ratios between carbon and oxygen as well as carbon and nitrogen. The C/O ratio was over 100, while the C/N ratio was over 10,000. In comparison, the Earth has a C/O ratio of .01 and a C/N ratio of 40. Obviously, there's a lot of carbon on this planet.

And that doesn't fit well with models of how scientists thought the planet should form. As part of the "black widow" process, the outer layers of the planet should have been either siphoned up by the companion star or burned away by that star's radiation. The fact that such a rich carbon atmosphere still exists remains a mystery. There are processes that can create such an atmosphere, such as a white-dwarf merger between who "carbon stars", but even that falls short of explaining how the planet's C/O ratio got so high.

Other aspects of the planet align with general theory though. Circulation models predict that rapidly rotating planets, like PSR J2322-2650b, would have strong westerly winds, which is different from the typical easterly winds on other tidally locked hot Jupiters. The JWST data show that the hottest part of the planet is about 12 degrees west of center, providing the first ever observational evidence of this western wind phenomena.

In other words, PSR J2322-2650b is contradictory. It's the right size and shape for a typical black widow pulsar system. Its window circulation also fits well with our best models. But its atmosphere is something else entirely, and scientists will have to go back to the theory to try to find a way to make it make sense with the new data. While they're busy doing that, JWST will continue scanning the sky for more anomalies that could drive the next scientific revolution.

This spectacular new image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows a star cocooned within a massive disk of gas and dust. It's a protoplanetary disk — a ring of dense gas and dust surrounding a young star — where planets are likely forming.

The star is IRAS 04302+2247, better known as the "Butterfly Star" because of how our edge-on view separates the bright nebula into two lobes.

The star system is about 525 light-years away, in the Taurus star-forming region, or Taurus Molecular Cloud, which is within the constellation Taurus in the night sky. It's the closest star-forming region to the solar system, and it's rich in molecular hydrogen, dust and heavier elements from past supernovas. These are raw materials for new stars and planets.

Much of this region is invisible to optical telescopes but is revealed in infrared light. This image is a combination of mostly optical data from the archive of the Hubble Space Telescope and new infrared data from JWST's Near Infrared Camera and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) , the European Space Agency (ESA) wrote in a description of the image.

Related: Will the James Webb telescope lead us to alien life? Scientists say we're getting closer than ever.

MIRI revealed a dark, dusty lane — the protoplanetary disk — that divides the nebula. It blocks the star's light, while surrounding gas and dust scatter the star's light. It's huge — about 40 billion miles (65 billion kilometers) across, or several times wider than the solar system, according to ESA.

The line of sight determines what astronomers can learn from images like this. In face-on images of protoplanetary disks, scientists can sometimes see rings, spirals or gaps where planets are forming. With an edge-on view like this, it's possible to study the thickness of a protoplanetary disk and how dust is distributed around it, both of which are key to understanding how planets form and accumulate mass. Here, dust is expected to settle toward the midplane, creating conditions where grains can clump and grow into planetesimals.

The image comes from a paper published last year in The Astrophysical Journal. The study found that the brightness of the nebula changes, which suggests the inner disk may be warped or misaligned. It's a glimpse into processes that may have shaped our own solar system billions of years ago.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Imagine a planet twice as wide as Earth, covered in an ocean that smells like sweet cabbage.

Every day, a faint red star warms this ocean world and the uncountable masses of hungry, plankton-like creatures that inhabit it. They rise to the surface by the billions, joining together in a living, floating continent larger than Australia — spewing out a pungent gas as they knit sunlight into food.

The sulfurous gas steams out of the alien bloom, filling the air so fully that a lone telescope floating 700 trillion miles (over a quadrillion kilometers) away can sense it — faintly, for just a few hours every month, when the watery planet glides in front of its small, red star. For those few hours, the alien algae of the pungent planet make themselves known to Earth.

It sounds like science fiction ... but is it?

For the past two years, this question has been the subject of intense debate among alien-hunting scientists, with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at its center. Captured in the powerful telescope's crosshairs is the planet K2-18b, located around 120 light-years from Earth. There's no question that the planet itself is real. But its surface conditions, as well as its likelihood of harboring life, remain contested.

One group of researchers who has studied K2-18b with JWST for the last few years claims to have detected signs of dimethyl sulfide (DMS). This compound, which has a cabbage-like odor, is what many Earthlings think of as "the smell of the sea" and is only known to be produced by living, breathing phytoplankton. The team first reported hints of DMS in K2-18b’s atmosphere in 2023, and has followed up with several papers since.

Outside researchers remain skeptical of this alleged DMS detection, however. They've cautioned that the team's detection relies on questionable data modeling and falls short of the threshold required to signify a new scientific discovery. Only further observations of the planet can truly settle the question.

But what isn't in doubt is that JWST's ultrapowerful infrared vision is giving humans the best-ever shot at finding extraterrestrial life.

Thanks to JWST, "we're learning more just in the last few years than we've learned in the preceding decades about the compositions of atmospheres outside the solar system," Eddie Schwieterman, an assistant professor of astrobiology at the University of California, Riverside who studies exoplanet habitability with JWST, told Live Science.

It's dogma in the search for alien life that where there's an atmosphere, there may also be water on a planet's surface — and where there's flowing water, there may be life. For the first time, JWST is bringing those alien atmospheres into focus.

"We are at a really important time in the search for life, in that we now have the technological capability to do it," said Victoria Meadows, a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington and director of the astrobiology graduate program. "Prior to JWST, we really did not have the capability to do this."

The breath of aliens

In the hunt for habitable planets — those that orbit in the "Goldilocks zone" of their home star, where liquid water can flow on the surface — JWST is in a class of its own.

Unlike Hubble and other optical telescopes, JWST can't directly image the surfaces of faraway planets. Nor can it detect radio waves and other potential "technosignatures" emitted by any advanced alien civilizations that might exist. The signs of life JWST seeks are far more elemental. They're not blurry snapshots of alien trackways or mysterious radio signals, but hints of molecules tumbling invisibly through space, far above a planet's surface.

"The first step in finding life is to find an atmosphere," Sebastian Zieba, a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Live Science. "In order to have liquid water on the surface, you need an atmosphere."

Compared with its predecessor — NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope (launched in 2003 and retired in 2020) — JWST is "better in every way," Zieba said. It can look farther across space and detect a broader range of infrared wavelengths than any telescope before it. Infrared emissions are crucial to the hunt for life, because those wavelengths are best at encoding information about the types of molecules that are absorbing or reemitting starlight in a planet's atmosphere.

For JWST to detect hints of an exoplanet's atmosphere, scientists must wait for a transit — the moment when a planet swoops in front of its home star, forcing that star's light to shine through the planet's atmosphere as seen from our perspective on Earth. In the case of K2-18b, for example, that happens once every 33 days.

"The planet passes in front of the star, and it backlights the atmosphere," Meadows said. "It's like a little halo around the planet."

That "halo" contains important clues about an alien world. As starlight streams through the planet's atmosphere, airborne molecules either absorb or reemit different wavelengths of light, changing what JWST sees when observing at those wavelengths. The unique signature of light compiled from these different wavelengths, called a spectrum, can reveal which molecules are in the atmosphere. This information, in turn, allows scientists to infer the planet's size, surface conditions, geography — and chances of supporting life.

For example, Meadows said, if JWST captures the spectrum of a planet that reveals high levels of methane and carbon dioxide absorption in its atmosphere, it could indicate a habitable world akin to Earth in the Archean eon (roughly 4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago), when primitive microbes were breaking down CO2 and spewing vast quantities of methane.

Proving those conditions exist on a planet trillions of miles away is the hard part.

The devil in the data

After making a promising biosignature detection, the challenge then becomes proving that it can't be explained by a geological process, such as volcanism. Then, scientists must demonstrate that their detection meets statistical significance — a rigorous undertaking that requires many repeat observations of the planet and verification from independent researchers using their own data models.

"Webb data is very complex," René Doyon, a professor at the University of Montreal and principal investigator of JWST's Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) instrument, told Live Science. "People have been publishing results that are not always consistent. Depending on who reduced the data, you get a different answer."

It's here that early studies of K2-18b have fallen under scrutiny. Despite the tentative detection of DMS reported in two studies by a team of University of Cambridge-led researchers, outside experts have so far been unable to verify the result when looking at the same observations with different data models. Furthermore, the DMS detection only reached the three-sigma level of statistical significance, falling far short of the required five-sigma level. (A three-sigma level is around a 3 in 1000 chance of being a fluke, while a five-sigma value means a result has a probability of 1 in 3.5 million of being a fluke).

Nikku Madhusudhan, a professor of astrophysics at Cambridge and lead author of the two DMS studies, said this is no reason to ignore K2-18b as a candidate for a habitable world "teeming with microbial life."

"We have initial feelers for what we are seeing, but we could be wrong," Madhusudhan told Live Science. "So let's be open to being wrong and get more data. Only then can we confirm what we're seeing."

Schwieterman thinks it was "premature" to announce the detection of DMS on K2-18b, given the questionable statistical significance. However, he agrees that DMS is a promising signature of life that JWST should continue hunting for on other potentially habitable ocean worlds.

"The question we want to ask is, how common are global biospheres in the universe?" Schwieterman said. If there's complex life out there, including intelligent life, then "a big part of that question is, how common are the biospheres from which those more complex forms of life would originate?"

Hitting a "bull's-eye"

Even if life doesn't ultimately materialize on K2-18b, the distant planet is just one of many being targeted by JWST's keen infrared eye.

The telescope's search list includes some of the usual suspects, such as the TRAPPIST-1 system — the single most-studied star system beyond our own. The system contains seven rocky planets, at least three of which may be in the star's habitable "Goldilocks" zone.

So far, JWST has not been able to confirm an atmosphere around any of the three potentially habitable planets TRAPPIST-1b, c, or d. However, a study published Sept. 8 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters has offered preliminary evidence of a possible nitrogen-based atmosphere around TRAPPIST-1e, making it one of the most hopeful contenders for an Earth-like planet beyond our solar system.

Meanwhile, Doyon favors studying a world called LHS 1140 b, located 50 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cetus. Doyon and team's observations with JWST reveal that the exoplanet, once thought to be a rocky "super-Earth" six times as massive as our planet, is a much bigger oddball — or, perhaps, an eyeball.

"It may be a bull's-eye planet," Doyon said, describing a mostly ice-coated planet with a single blue "iris" of liquid water pointed toward its home star.

Using JWST data from two transits of LHS 1140 b, Doyon and colleagues reestimated the mass and radius of the planet and found "it cannot be explained as a rocky planet — it must have something between 10% and 20% of its mass in water," Doyon said. "It's a potential waterworld, and it's right in the habitable zone."

According to Doyon, LHS 1140 b doesn't resemble Earth so much as it resembles our solar system's icy moons Europa and Enceladus, both of which are suspected to harbor subsurface oceans that could support life. But unlike those moons, this planet is so close to its home star that some of its ice may have sublimated into gas, forming an atmosphere. It's even possible that the sun-facing side of the planet (which, like Earth's moon, is tidally locked) could heat up enough for the ice to melt there, revealing a liquid-water ocean beneath a cloudy sky. As such, this warm, blue "iris" could host life.

Doyon thinks this is one the likeliest known exoplanets to harbor an atmosphere.

"If I had to bet a beer on whether it has an atmosphere, it probably has one," he said.

Pushed to the limits

Sadly, Doyon's beer will likely have to wait.

Although Doyon and his colleagues detected "hints" of a nitrogen-rich atmosphere around LHS 1140 b, he said it will take about a dozen more transits to prove whether there are other molecules indicative of an Earth-like atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide. Because LHS 1140 b becomes visible from Earth only four times a year, scientists would have to observe every possible transit for years to come before making any firm conclusions. It's a schedule that "really pushes JWST to its limits," Doyon added.

This underscores one of the telescope's biggest limitations: time.

In 2024, researchers around the world requested a total of more than 78,000 hours of JWST observation time — about nine times more than is available, according to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which manages JWST proposals each year. Of the more than 2,300 submissions, only 274 proposals were ultimately accepted, with exoplanet habitability research accounting for a small percentage.

That discrepancy is likely to widen with the passage of the Trump administration's proposed budget for 2026, which includes a nearly 50% cut to NASA's science budget, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. If approved by Congress, the cuts would amount to a roughly 25% to 35% reduction in JWST operations, Neill Reid, multimission project scientist at STScI, said in July at the 246th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Anchorage, Alaska.

Finding the unforgettable

In the end, JWST may not uncover a smoking gun in the search for extraterrestrial life. But even if it doesn't, it will likely help scientists determine where to search next. Future telescopes will build on JWST's revelations, helping to fill in the missing gaps.

One major gap is oxygen. While the gas makes up about 21% of Earth's atmosphere and is a potent biosignature, "JWST can't do oxygen," Meadows said.

Multiple studies — including one co-authored by Meadows, in which researchers modeled what JWST would see if it studied Earth's atmosphere — have found that the telescope is simply not sensitive enough to detect oxygen. That poses a clear challenge to detecting Earth-like atmospheres.

Forthcoming telescopes could help account for that. For example, the Extremely Large Telescope — a powerful optical/near-infrared telescope being constructed in Chile that could see first light in 2029 — will be more sensitive to oxygen and water in planetary atmospheres than JWST is, Meadows said. It will also be able to peer all the way down to the surfaces of rocky planets — closer to where life and its byproducts are more likely to be, unlike the high upper atmospheres that are JWST's domain.

Further down the line, NASA's recently announced Habitable Worlds Observatory will take a census of planets around sunlike stars close to our solar neighborhood. Parsing visible, infrared and ultraviolet light signatures, the powerful observatory could potentially confirm atmospheres around dozens of Earth-like worlds. Currently, however, there is no planned launch date.

With JWST expected to remain operational at least into the 2030s, its era of discovery is just beginning. Will it find alien life? Maybe, maybe not. But in its first years, it's already leading scientists closer to that first tantalizing glimpse of evidence than any telescope has before.

And once that evidence is found — even if it's on a distant exoplanet that no human or probe will ever lay eyes on — there's no going back. Finding evidence of even one other inhabited planet would imply that there could be countless others out there, raising big questions about the prevalence of life in the universe, and where humans fit into it. The discovery of an alien world would change how we view the cosmos, as well as ourselves.

"Once we find a credible hint of evidence for life on an exoplanet … I don't think we're ever going to forget about that planet," Schwieterman said. "It's going to be both a scientific and cultural touchstone. Kids are going to learn about it in school."

Editor's note: This article was updated on Sep. 10 at 2 p.m. ET to include details from a new study on the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1e.