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26 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: August 12, 2026.
A Missouri team compared star clusters mapped by Gaia and found the mix of large and small stars differs from cluster to cluster — breaking a 50-year assumption and possibly explaining Webb's impossibly heavy early galaxies.
A massive, chemically mature spiral with a 14,700-light-year central bar existed just over a billion years after the Big Bang — a structure astronomers thought could not form so early.
Astronomers argue the universe's X-ray-silent, seemingly overmassive black holes are actually smaller objects feeding at furious rates — a finding that could defuse one of cosmology's freshest crises.
The galaxy M1149-BSG-z5 already had a central bar of stars less than 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang — a structure astronomers assumed couldn't exist so early, and one that rewrites the timeline for how galaxies grow up.
To celebrate the James Webb Space Telescope's fourth science anniversary, NASA unveiled a new view of Centaurus A, peering through the dust that had long hidden the galaxy's violent heart.
In 65 hours of infrared observations, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope resolved the frenetic starburst galaxy Messier 82 in unprecedented detail, exposing a warped disk and millions of individual suns.
Following a gamma-ray burst to its source, the James Webb Space Telescope caught a collapsing massive star from the cosmic dawn and, for the first time at such a distance, imaged its faint host galaxy.
The most detailed spectrum yet of one of these ancient objects strongly favors a black hole cloaked in hot gas over a galaxy full of stars — evidence, researchers say, of heavy black-hole seeds being born in real time.
After a decade hidden in its star's glare, the giant world GJ 504 b gave up its secrets to Webb in just two hours — revealing water, methane, ammonia and, for the first time, clouds made of salt.
For the first time, astronomers measured the chemistry of a moon-forming disc circling the exoplanet CT Cha b, finding it rich in carbon-bearing molecules like benzene and acetylene.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope and a cosmic magnifying glass, scientists measured a dormant giant in a galaxy 10 billion light-years away, smashing the previous distance record fifteenfold.
Using its largest survey to date, the James Webb Space Telescope traced the vast network of filaments and voids connecting more than 164,000 galaxies back to when the universe was just a billion years old.
On the scorching exoplanet WASP-94A b, the James Webb Space Telescope found thick clouds of vaporized rock at dawn that vanish by sunset — a finding that may upend a decade of exoplanet measurements.
Astronomers were stunned to find that XMM-VID1-2075, a massive galaxy formed less than two billion years after the Big Bang, shows no sign of rotation — a trait normally seen only in much older, evolved systems.
New simulations suggest small 'seed' black holes gorged on gas faster than thought possible, explaining the monsters the James Webb telescope found just after the Big Bang.
In a 'little red dot' 13 billion light-years away, a supermassive black hole makes up most of the object's mass — a finding scientists call a paradigm shift.
Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to show that Saturn's apparently shifting rotation rate was an illusion created by powerful high-altitude winds — and that the planet's auroras run a self-sustaining heat engine.
James Webb Space Telescope reveals that Saturn's aurora creates powerful winds that generate electrical currents, making the planet appear to change rotation rates.
EGS-z11-R0 is large, regular and chemically enriched at a moment when galaxies are supposed to be small, blue and primordial — defying leading models of structure formation.
Modeling shows axion-like particles in a narrow mass window can trigger direct collapse of gas clouds into billion-solar-mass black holes — the kind James Webb keeps finding too early in cosmic history.
TOI-5205 b — a Jupiter-sized world orbiting a tiny red dwarf — has an atmosphere poorer in heavy elements than even its own star, with its bulk interior locking away 100 times more metals than reach the observable atmosphere.
A precessing black hole jet in galaxy VV 340a is sweeping hot plasma across its entire host galaxy like a cosmic sprinkler, stripping star-forming gas at a rate equivalent to 19 suns per year.
TOI-561 b was expected to be a bare, airless rock baked by its star — but temperature measurements reveal it is cooler than it should be, pointing to an atmosphere that may be continuously replenished by volcanic outgassing on the 10-billion-year-old world.
Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope identified L 98-59 d, 35 light-years away, as the first confirmed member of a new planetary class — a 'magma world' with a sulfur-rich atmosphere and a globe-spanning molten rock interior that has never stopped burning.
A University of Arizona team led by Sukrit Ranjan observed faint methane signatures across four transits of TRAPPIST-1e using Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph — results that, if confirmed, would mark the first-ever detection of an atmosphere on a potentially habitable world beyond our solar system.
NASA's JWST captures the Exposed Cranium Nebula 5,000 light-years away.