Inbox Astronomy: NASA's Webb Finds New Evidence for Planet Around Closest Solar Twin

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NASA's Webb Finds New Evidence for Planet Around Closest Solar Twin

Release date: Thursday, August 7, 2025 11:00:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

Data shows planet could be a gas giant, orbiting 1 to 2 times the distance between Sun and Earth.

The Alpha Centauri System, the closest star system to our own solar system, has made several appearances in science fiction and pop culture, mostly as a symbol for potential future interstellar travel or even as home to planets teeming with life. However, reality is a little different than what Hollywood has dreamed up.

This chaotic system contains two Sun-like stars, Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, and a faint red dwarf star, Proxima Centauri, the only star of the system confirmed to host three confirmed planets.

New observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope are now providing the strongest evidence to date of a gas giant planet surrounding Alpha Centauri A.

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Inbox Astronomy: As NASA Missions Study Interstellar Comet, Hubble Makes Size Estimate

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As NASA Missions Study Interstellar Comet, Hubble Makes Size Estimate

Release date: Thursday, August 7, 2025 10:00:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

Icy Comet Nucleus is No Bigger Than a Few Miles Across  

When an unexpected visitor from deep space was discovered in early July 2025, among the biggest mysteries were: What is it? and How big is it? Hubble observations helped answer these questions. The interstellar vagabond, 3I/ATLAS, behaves like a comet. Hubble sent back crisp pictures of a teardrop-shaped cocoon of dust coming off the comet towards the Sun, then blown back by sunlight. Hubble’s sharp vision shows that the comet’s solid, icy nucleus can’t be much bigger than 3.5 miles across. This ancient, central “snowball” is too small and far away to be directly observed by Hubble, at least for now. Another big question is: Where did it come from? This is completely unknown. Its high velocity is evidence that it took many billions of years to arrive at our solar system from a far corner of our galaxy.

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Inbox Astronomy: NASA's Webb Traces Details of Complex Planetary Nebula

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NASA's Webb Traces Details of Complex Planetary Nebula

Release date: Wednesday, July 30, 2025 10:00:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

More than one star contributes to the irregular shape of NGC 6072.

The lifecycle of stars is one of the most well-studied areas of astronomical study, but is still shrouded in mystery. Stars are essentially the cosmic engines that shape the universe. They populate the universe with elements, some key to life as we know it. Planetary nebulas are spectacular showings of a star, 1 to 8 times the mass of our Sun, as it is dying, casting off a glowing shell of gas and dust. Eventually, our own Sun will go through this phase. However, it’s astronomers’ best guess on specifically what that last hurrah will look like – not that we’ll be around to see. Studying planetary nebulas outside our solar system may provide insights into that, however, more powerful telescopes and detailed studies have shown the process isn’t as straightforward as once thought. Complicated dynamics in systems, including interacting stars, create messy scenes, as seen in NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s newest look at a planetary nebula, NGC 6072.

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Inbox Astronomy: NASA's Hubble, Chandra Spot Rare Type of Black Hole Eating a Star

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NASA's Hubble, Chandra Spot Rare Type of Black Hole Eating a Star

Release date: Thursday, July 24, 2025 10:00:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

Hubble Looks at an Intermediate Black Hole Roaming Inside a Galaxy

Black holes, trap doors in space, come in a vast range of sizes. Some are a few times the mass of our Sun. The largest are billions of times the mass of our Sun. There is a curious gap in the range of black hole sizes. A rare class called “intermediate mass” black holes (IMBHs) weigh between a few hundred to a few 100,000 times the mass of our Sun. Unlike their much bigger cousins, monster black holes in the core of galaxies, they’re harder to find. They have to be caught in the act of foraging. When they occasionally devour a hapless bypassing star — in what astronomers call a tidal disruption event  — they pour out a gusher of radiation. This has been captured both by the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes. A recent black hole fishing expedition found an IMBH nestled on the outskirts of a huge elliptical galaxy, NGC 6099, located 450 million light-years away. IMBHs represent a crucial missing link in black hole evolution between stellar mass and supermassive black holes.

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Inbox Astronomy: NASA's Webb Scratches Beyond Surface of Cat’s Paw for 3rd Anniversary

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NASA's Webb Scratches Beyond Surface of Cat’s Paw for 3rd Anniversary

Release date: Thursday, July 10, 2025 10:00:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

What lies within a toe bean? According to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, mini toe beans composed of gas, dust, and stars.

Since the start of its science operations in July 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope has amazed scientists and the public alike with its ability to peer farther into the cosmos than ever before. With each infrared-light observation, the telescope continues to reveal aspects of the universe previously unknown to us.

To mark its third year of highly productive science, astronomers used Webb to scratch beyond the surface of the Cat’s Paw Nebula (NGC 6334), a massive, local star-forming region. This near-infrared view, which shows a portion of a singular “toe bean,” reveals a subset of mini toe bean-reminiscent structures composed of gas, dust, and young stars.

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Inbox Astronomy: NASA Webb 'Pierces' Bullet Cluster, Refines Its Mass

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NASA Webb 'Pierces' Bullet Cluster, Refines Its Mass

Release date: Monday, June 30, 2025 10:00:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

Webb shows fainter and more distant galaxies, along with light from stars that trace dark matter in these galaxy clusters, helping researchers carefully map everything in the scene.

It’s rare for galaxy clusters to collide and merge at high speeds. An iconic example is the Bullet Cluster, the aftermath of two vast galaxy clusters that collided. To be able to “replay” what happened, and in which order, researchers need to first fully define all the contents in this scene.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has provided some of the best information to date: Highly precise, extremely detailed near-infrared images of a significant portion of the Bullet Cluster. Its new observations allowed researchers to fine tune their maps of its mass, including an invisible substance known as dark matter that does not emit, reflect, or absorb light.

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Inbox Astronomy: NASA's Webb Digs into Structural Origins of Disk Galaxies

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NASA's Webb Digs into Structural Origins of Disk Galaxies

Release date: Thursday, June 26, 2025 10:00:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

Scientists “excavated” disk galaxies across cosmic time to understand their formation history.

Disk galaxies, like our own Milky Way galaxy, commonly consist of both a thick and thin disk of stars — each with different features, including stellar population and movement. Three major theoretical scenarios have been proposed to explain the formation mechanisms and timing of thick and thin disks.

A team of astronomers has recently investigated the structure of disk galaxies by sifting through multiple surveys from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. This extensive sample includes over 100 edge-on disk galaxies up to roughly 11 billion years ago. The team’s analysis aligns with one of the three scenarios, suggesting that thick stellar disk formation occurs first, and thin stellar disk formation follows. When this happens in a galaxy’s formation history depends on the galaxy’s mass.

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Inbox Astronomy: Likely Saturn-Mass Planet Imaged by NASA Webb Is Lightest Ever Seen

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Likely Saturn-Mass Planet Imaged by NASA Webb Is Lightest Ever Seen

Release date: Wednesday, June 25, 2025 11:00:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

The newfound planet represents Webb’s first direct image discovery of a planet.

Almost 6,000 exoplanets have been discovered to date. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has just added another likely planet to that list: a Saturn-mass planet named TWA 7 b. Astronomers found it by blocking the light of its host star to reveal the hidden planet. It’s located in a gap in one of three dust rings that were discovered around the star TWA 7 by previous ground-based observations. The object’s brightness, color, distance from the star, and position within the ring are consistent with theoretical predictions for a planet that is expected to be sculpting the surrounding debris disk.

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