Shine, dream, smile! Oh, let us light up the night… with a pair of new stars, and maybe some planets!
Webb captured edge-on views of two protoplanetary disks, which will help us better understand the process of planet formation.
t.co/kxzH0WR3Uu
🔗 esawebb.org/images/potm2603a/
The end is near! The fate of this nebula's central star and Webby voting is the same, both reaching the end.
There are a few hours left to get your Webby vote in! Voting ends tonight (Thursday, April 16) at 11:59 PM PDT. Click here to submit yours: t.co/H77VV0SoUd
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There's still one more day to cast your vote in @TheWebbyAwards!
If you've enjoyed unfolding the universe with us this year, vote here: t.co/H77VV0SoUd
To MoM-z14 and back 💞
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Wait, there's more Webb in this year's @TheWebbyAwards!
Vote for Cosmic Dawn as the best longform documentary by Thursday, April 16: t.co/PDnjMJrZPp
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Webb directly imaged 29 Cygni b, an object 15 times the mass of Jupiter, to find out if it formed like a planet or a star, since they result from different processes. Data show it's a planet! t.co/K48elMpcRs
🔗 science.nasa.gov/missions/w...
There’s nothing we love more than sharing the universe with you all. If you feel the same, vote for us in @TheWebbyAwards by Thursday, April 16!
Vote here: t.co/H77VV0SoUd
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Learn more about gravitational lensing in this @NASAGoddard Glossary!
Nature’s magnifying glass 🔎
Galaxies in these images might look stretched or warped. That’s due to gravitational lensing, a tool that allows us to peer even further into the universe! https://go.nasa.gov/3KLgN9Y https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G2GJ7ibW0AA2ZMm.jpg
In contrast, in the near-infrared, it’s the colorful stars that steal the show in Sgr B2. Astronomers will seek to learn more about their masses and ages, to better learn about how stars are formed in this dense, active region of the galactic center.
Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument captured glowing cosmic dust heated by very young massive stars in unprecedented detail in Sgr B2. Note that while the dust and gas glow dramatically, all the bright stars disappear from view.
Even with Webb’s sensitive infrared capability, which allows it to see through clouds of dust and gas, there are regions so dense that even Webb can’t see through them. These thick clouds are the raw material of future stars and a cocoon for those still too young to shine.
Webb took a look at the Sagittarius B2 molecular cloud, the most massive, and active star-forming region in our galaxy, located only a few hundred light years from our central black hole. Why is it so much more active than the rest of the galactic center? https://go.nasa.gov/46lurcz https://pbs.twim
The 1st exoplanet was found just a few decades ago; now we know they are the rule, not the exception. Celebrate the 6000th confirmed exoplanet, with @NASAJPL's Dr. Eric Mamajek and the Small Steps, Giant Leaps podcast. https://go.nasa.gov/3W1vQPj https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G1eLCs7WcAEoWCG.jpg
Learn more about how Webb is supporting our search for life beyond Earth: science.nasa.gov/blogs/webb/2025/04/18/ho...
Are we alone in the universe?
With Webb’s unprecedented infrared sensitivity, we can detect exoplanet atmospheres and study their chemical compositions in an attempt to answer that question.
But what would it take to be able to say that we found life? We asked a NASA scientist.
Questions remain: why aren’t LRD seen after 1.5 billion years post-big bang? Why aren't they bright in X-rays like modern black holes? Is this how black holes grew in the early universe? Future observations will help astronomers find answers; for now this "case" remains open.
We know LRD emerged in large numbers and then declined between ~600 million to 1.5 billion years after the big bang. Some 70% of them show evidence of containing rapidly orbiting gas - a sign of an accretion disk obscuring a central supermassive black hole.
Webb is solving mysteries it created. Remember “little red dots?” They seemed too big to exist in the early universe... and maybe theory couldn’t account for them. It turns out they may be a new class of galaxy containing growing supermassive black holes. https://t.co/OXo6TzNgus https://t.co/Y
Some of these dust shells have persisted for more than 130 years, and this system could generate tens of thousands of shells over hundreds of thousands of years. Ultimately, massive stars end their lives in a supernova explosion, likely the fate of Wolf-Rayet 140.
Like clockwork, the stars’ winds generate dust for several months every eight years, as the pair make their closest approach to each other. Webb shows where dust formation stops — look for the darker region at top left of the images.
Though many events in space take place over vast timescales, these rings (Webb spotted 17 of them) are moving outward from their stars at more than 1600 miles/s, making them noticeably different from one year to the next. This animation shows changes in WR140 between 2022-2023.
Wolf-Rayet 140 contains two massive stars that follow a tight, elongated orbit. (In these images, they are within the central white dot.) As they swing past each other, their stellar winds collide, compressing and forming these rings of carbon-rich dust.
Like images of broken light, Webb captured these carbon-rich dust shells around a binary star system. Drifting swiftly outwards, they are seeding their surroundings with carbon - one way elements spread across the universe. https://t.co/gjfLhdaP1x https://t.co/rbFjcpKjgm
@NASAHubble How do these disks survive long enough to form massive planets? Maybe it takes longer for stars in clusters with fewer heavier elements to blow away their disks. Maybe the gas clouds that formed these stars are more massive, producing bigger disks that take longer to disperse.
@NASAHubble Webb's instruments can split up light into its components, unlocking the chemical make-up of whatever it is observing. Webb saw that the stars in star cluster NGC 346 do have longer-lived disks allowing their planets time to form and grow - despite the lack of heavier elements.
@NASAHubble In 2003, Hubble found evidence of a massive planet in our galaxy from a long-ago time when stars only had small amounts of heavy elements like iron and carbon - the building blocks of planets. How could this planet grow so massive in these conditions? https://t.co/9rupDl5FxL
A riddle wrapped in a 20-year-old @nasahubble mystery…
Webb confirmed a controversial finding of Hubble’s - planet-forming disks in the early universe that are longer-lived than they should be, given the conditions in their environment. Read more: https://t.co/NVsUmuHmlf https://t.co/PYms9yaWEX
It's that time of year, let's make some snowflakes! ❄️
Fold and cut your own using our Webb template: https://t.co/ET8aN3vBO8 https://t.co/gJcUNdccKF
Other galaxies detected by Webb from this time period in the Universe’s history are much more massive than the Firefly Sparkle, which itself is more similar in mass to what our Milky Way’s might have been at this same stage of development.
These clusters of star formation are the Firefly Sparkle galaxy’s building blocks. The analysis of the colors confirms that the star formation didn’t happen all at once, but was staggered over time, with each clump of stars at a different phase of formation or evolution.
