Forging of Stars & Planets

New insights into the formation of gas streams that propel the growth of infant stars have been unveiled by astronomers with help from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, revealing deeper insights into how they feed on material from their surrounding disks.

The new findings are offering astronomers unprecedented new details about young stars and planets, and the processes that give rise to their formation and evolution over time.

The new research focused on investigations into the structure of gas flows in protoplanetary disks, which are the massive, dusty clouds of gas surrounding newly formed stars. Based on recent Webb telescope data, researchers involved were able to confirm the existence of a previously “hidden” mechanism that astronomers have long suspected to be behind what allows stars to gain mass as they grow.

Revealing a Magnetic Mystery
Detailed in a new paper in Nature Astronomy, the new research, led by scientists from the University of Arizona and supported by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, reveals that magnetic winds play a key role in transporting material that helps stars grow, along with shaping the mass present in their surrounding disk into a planetary system.     READ MORE...

Einstein Ring Seen by James Webb Telescope

A massive galaxy (blue dot) warps the light emitted by an active black hole (orange dots) in a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. | Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA

A beautiful, "bejeweled" halo of warped light generated by a monster black hole takes center stage in one of the latest James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images. The luminous loop, which is strikingly similar to an "Einstein ring," is adorned by four bright spots — but not all of them are real.

The star-studded halo in the new image is made up of light from a quasar — a supermassive black hole at the heart of a young galaxy that shoots out powerful energy jets as it gobbles up enormous amounts of matter. This quasar, previously known to scientists, is named RX J1131-1231 and is located around 6 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Crater, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).

A Beginner's Guide to the Universe

 

TO SEE IMAGES FROM THE JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE, CLICK HERE...

Finding Unexpected Galaxies

The James Webb Space Telescope keeps finding galaxies that shouldn’t exist, a scientist has warned.

Six of the earliest and most massive galaxies that Nasa’s breakthrough telescope has seen so far appear to be bigger and more mature than they should be given where they are in the universe, researchers have warned.

The new findings build on previous research where scientists reported that despite coming from the very beginnings of the universe, the galaxies were as mature as our own Milky Way.

Now a new paper has appeared to confirm those findings, by “stress testing” the galaxies to better understand how they formed.

It suggests that, if scientists have not made a mistake, we may be missing some fundamental information about the universe.

“If the masses are right, then we are in uncharted territory,” said Mike Boylan-Kolchin, from the University.of Texas at Austin, and the author of a new paper examining the unsual galaxies. “We’ll require something very new about galaxy formation or a modification to cosmology. One of the most extreme possibilities is that the universe was expanding faster shortly after the Big Bang than we predict, which might require new forces and particles.”

Professor Boylan-Kolchin’s paper, ‘Stress testing ΛCDM with high-redshift galaxy candidates’, has been published in Nature Astronomy this week.

It suggests that the information from the JWST proposes a profound dilemma for scientists. The data indicates that there mighttbe somehitn wrong with the dark energy and cold dark matter paradigm, or ΛCDM, that has been guiding cosmology for decades.

Usually, galaxies convert around 10 per cent of their gas into stars. But the newly discovered galaxies would have to be converting almost the entirety of it into stars.

That is theoretically possible. But it is a departure from what scientists would ever have expected.  READ MORE...

Mysterious Rings in Space

The James Webb Space Telescope captured the star WR 140 surrounded by strange concentric shells. (Image credit: NASA/ESA /CSA /Ryan Lau /JWST ERS Team /Judy Schmidt)

The James Webb Space Telescope captured mysterious concentric rings around a distant star that astronomers are still working to explain.


The image, taken in July, was released on Twitter by citizen scientist Judy Schmidt, prompting a torrent of comments and head-scratching. It shows a star known as WR140 surrounded by regular ripple-like circles that gradually fade away. The circles, however, are not perfectly round, but have a somewhat square-like feel to them, prompting speculations about possible alien origins.

"I think it's just nature doing something that is simple, but when we look at it from only one viewpoint it seems impossible, at first, to understand that it is a natural phenomenon," Schmidt told Space.com in an email. "Why is it shaped the way it is? Why is it so regular?"

Mark McCaughrean, an interdisciplinary scientist in the James Webb Space Telescope Science Working Group and a science advisor to the European Space Agency, called the feature "bonkers" in a Twitter thread.


"The six-pointed blue structure is an artifact due to optical diffraction from the bright star WR140 in this #JWST MIRI image," he wrote. "But red curvy-yet-boxy stuff is real, a series of shells around WR140. Actually in space. Around a star."

He noted that WR140 is what astronomers call a Wolf-Rayet star, which have spat much of their hydrogen into space. These objects are also surrounded by dust, he added, which a companion star is sculpting into the strange shells.

Astronomers will know more soon thanks to a scientific paper currently under review about this mysterious phenomenon.  READ MORE...

Space Telescope Finds Supernova

ASTRONOMERS spotted something unusual happening in a distant galaxy in recent images from the James Webb Space Telescope — something that wasn’t there when Hubble last looked at the same galaxy.

"We suspect it's a supernova," astronomer Mike Engesser of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) tells Inverse. Finding short-lived cosmic events like supernovae isn’t what Webb was designed to do, but the newly-operational space telescope seems to be full of surprises. 

And this one could open the door for looking for the death throes of the universe's first generations of massive stars.  WHAT’S NEW – Engesser and his colleagues say the bright object is probably the first supernova spotted by the Webb Telescope. 

It's extremely bright compared to the rest of the galaxy, for one thing. And Webb observed the galaxy, called SDSS.J141930.11+5251593, twice, five days apart; the object dimmed, just slightly, over those five days — classic supernova behavior.

"We would need more time series data to make a determination, but the data we do have does match that of a supernova, so it's a very good candidate," says Engesser.  READ MORE...

The James Webb Telescope

The $10bn James Webb telescope has left Earth on its mission to show the first stars to light up the Universe.

The observatory was lifted skyward by an Ariane rocket from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana.

Its flight to orbit lasted just under half an hour, with a signal confirming a successful outcome picked up by a ground antenna at Malindi in Kenya.

Webb, named after one of the architects of the Apollo Moon landings, is the successor to the Hubble telescope.

Engineers working with the US, European and Canadian space agencies have built the new observatory to be 100 times more powerful, however.

"Lift off from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself, James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the Universe," said American space agency (Nasa) TV commentator Rob Navias at the moment the rocket left the Earth.

Lift-off was eagerly awaited but accompanied also by a good deal of anxiety. Thousands of people worldwide have worked on the project over the past 30 years, and even though the Ariane is a very dependable vehicle - there are no guarantees when it comes to rockets.  READ MORE...