Inbox Astronomy: STScI Astronomer Carol Christian Elected AAAS Fellow

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STScI Astronomer Carol Christian Elected AAAS Fellow

Release date: Thursday, March 27, 2025 10:00:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

Dr. Christian is being honored by the AAAS for exceptional leadership in bringing astronomy and astronomy images to the broader range of the public, notably the seeing impaired.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has elected Dr. Carol Christian, Hubble Space Telescope Outreach Project Scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, as a 2024 Fellow of the AAAS. She is currently team lead of 3D Astronomy, a project bringing Hubble telescope and Webb telescope data, as well as data from other sources, to visually impaired individuals. She's also co-investigator on the Career Exploration Lab program that supports educators with tools to engage blind and visually impaired students and includes a summer camp experience.

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Inbox Astronomy: NASA's Webb Sees Galaxy Mysteriously Clearing Fog of Early Universe

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NASA's Webb Sees Galaxy Mysteriously Clearing Fog of Early Universe

Release date: Wednesday, March 26, 2025 12:00:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

Unexpected, bright hydrogen emission caught astronomers by surprise.

The early universe was filled with a thick fog of neutral hydrogen. Even though the first stars and galaxies emitted copious amounts of ultraviolet light, that light struggled to pierce the fog. It took hundreds of millions of years for the neutral hydrogen to become ionized, electrons stripped from protons, allowing light to travel freely through space.

Astronomers are seeking to understand this unique time of transformation, known as the era of reionization. A newly discovered galaxy illuminated this era in an unexpected way. JADES-GS-z13-1, observed just 330 million years after the big bang, shows bright hydrogen emission that should have been absorbed by the cosmic fog. Theorists are struggling to explain how its light could have pierced the fog at such an early time.

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Inbox Astronomy: NASA's Webb Captures Neptune's Auroras For First Time

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NASA's Webb Captures Neptune's Auroras For First Time

Release date: Wednesday, March 26, 2025 6:00:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

Long-sought auroral glow finally emerges under Webb’s powerful gaze.

Neptune lies in the frigid, dark, vast frontier of the outer edges of our solar system about 3 billion miles away from the Sun.

It’s only been visited once by a spacecraft back in 1989, and since then, observatories like NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have tracked the planet’s changing weather. Hubble even discovered a new moon orbiting the planet in 2013.

In many images, the planet appears as a blueish orb, sometimes with disappearing and reappearing dark spots. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has now revealed a different appearance—for the first time, a bright auroral glow from this ice giant.

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Inbox Astronomy: NASA's Webb Telescope Unmasks True Nature of the Cosmic Tornado

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NASA's Webb Telescope Unmasks True Nature of the Cosmic Tornado 

Release date: Monday, March 24, 2025 10:00:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

Webb’s exquisite details reveal a chance, random alignment of a protostellar outflow and a distant spiral galaxy.

When peering out into space, we get a 2D view of a 3D universe. Sometimes, images will capture objects that appear close to each other on the sky, but are actually at wildly different distances and are unassociated with each other.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured this beautiful juxtaposition of the nearby protostellar outflow known as Herbig-Haro 49/50 with a perfectly positioned, more distant spiral galaxy. Due to the close proximity of this Herbig-Haro object to the Earth, this new composite infrared image of the outflow from a young star allows researchers to examine details on small spatial scales like never before. With Webb, we can better understand how the jet activity associated with the formation of young stars can affect their surrounding environment.

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Inbox Astronomy: NASA's Webb Images Young, Giant Exoplanets, Detects Carbon Dioxide

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NASA's Webb Images Young, Giant Exoplanets, Detects Carbon Dioxide

Release date: Monday, March 17, 2025 10:00:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

Findings suggest giant exoplanets in HR 8799 system likely formed like Jupiter and Saturn.

The first planet outside our solar system was discovered in the 1990’s, but it wasn’t until more than a decade later astronomers actually obtained a direct image of one. It’s extremely difficult to image an exoplanet, as stars in other planetary systems can be thousands of times brighter and bigger than their planets.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is equipped with a highly sensitive coronagraph, a tiny mask that blocks the light of the star, allowing Webb to image exoplanets.

Webb’s new images of two iconic systems, HR 8799 and 51 Eridani, and their planets have stunned researchers, and provided additional information into the chemical make-up of the young gas giants.

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Inbox Astronomy: NASA's Webb Peers Deeper into Mysterious Flame Nebula

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NASA's Webb Peers Deeper into Mysterious Flame Nebula

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

New population census answers the question: How small can you go when forming stars and brown dwarfs?

The Flame Nebula, a star-forming region in the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, has a long history of observation from telescopes such as NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. However, the smallest stars within its dark and dusty heart have largely been hidden from view. The infrared vision from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has taken a first-time look, counting the smallest and faintest objects to determine the lowest mass required to form brown dwarfs.

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Inbox Astronomy: NASA Webb Wows With Incredible Detail in Actively Forming Star System

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NASA Webb Wows With Incredible Detail in Actively Forming Star System

Release date: Friday, March 7, 2025 10:00:00 AM Eastern Standard Time

This near-infrared image shows the history of ejections from the two actively forming stars in Lynds 483.

This scene is still transforming.

What look like twin flames are known as Lynds 483 (L483), ejections from two actively forming stars at the center. The stars themselves are hidden in a teeny, opaque disk of dust that fits into one pixel. This is the most detailed image of L483 to date, delivered in high-resolution near-infrared light by the James Webb Space Telescope.

For tens of thousands of years, the two central stars have been sending out column-like jets along with more “relaxed” outflows that willow, spread, and drape. As the ejections run into one another, new molecules form within the lobes.

After roughly 1 million years have passed, the stars’ outbursts will end, with the stars fully formed. The iridescent regions of gas and dust will fade, and the scene will significantly clear.

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Inbox Astronomy: NASA's Hubble Finds Kuiper Belt Duo May Be Trio

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NASA's Hubble Finds Kuiper Belt Duo May Be Trio

Release date: Tuesday, March 4, 2025 11:00:00 AM Eastern Standard Time

A potential triple system of Kuiper Belt objects, only the second ever found, would support the theory that these rocky bodies form by gravitational collapse, like stars.

The universe contains a range of gravitationally bound three-body systems, from triple star systems to planets with two moons, like Mars. New research suggests that objects in the solar system's Kuiper Belt may also be in the triple club, as a second system, already identified as a binary, shows signs of containing a third member that is so close to its companion it can only be identified by observing the system's orbital dynamics. Confirming two triple systems in the Kuiper Belt would raise the likelihood that there are many other hidden triples there waiting to be recognized. The larger implication of this research is its support for a formation theory for Kuiper Belt objects known as the streaming instability hypothesis, which proposes that they formed not by collisions, but originated as triple systems through gravitational collapse.

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Inbox Astronomy: NASA's Webb Exposes Complex Atmosphere of Starless Super-Jupiter

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NASA's Webb Exposes Complex Atmosphere of Starless Super-Jupiter

Release date: Monday, March 3, 2025 10:00:00 AM Eastern Standard Time

Webb has captured evidence for patchy cloud layers, high-altitude hot spots, and variations in chemistry around a rapidly rotating, free-floating object 20 light-years from Earth. 

Getting a nice, good look at a planet outside our solar system can be tricky. Some exoplanets are way too cool and dim to observe. Many are virtually invisible in the blinding glare of their host stars. Others spin so slowly it would take days to survey the entire planet.

This is where a stand-in like SIMP 0136 — a hot, bright, planet-sized object with a thick atmosphere, extremely fast rotation rate, and no star to spoil the view — comes in handy. Although SIMP 0136 is not technically an exoplanet because it doesn’t orbit a star, it’s close enough.

Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to monitor SIMP 0136 directly as different parts of the object rotate into view, researchers have been able to disentangle the brightness patterns of hundreds of colors of infrared light coming from different parts of the object’s atmosphere. The results reveal variations in cloud cover, temperature, and chemistry that provide insight into the three-dimensional complexity of gas giants within and beyond our solar system.

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