James

‘It’s extremely worrisome.’ NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope faces potential 20% budget cut just 4 years after launch

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The galaxy GN-z11 as seen by Hubble (inset) an illustration of a feeding black hole

The scientists behind NASA’s largest and most powerful space telescope ever built are bracing for potentially crippling budget cuts, and the observatory is only halfway through its primary mission. The team overseeing NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been directed to prepare for up to 20% in budget cuts that would touch on every … Read more

James Webb Space Telescope finds our Milky Way galaxy’s supermassive black hole blowing bubbles (image, video)

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an orange-and-yellow orb on a black-and-blue mottled background

The black hole at the heart of our galaxy is a real party animal, endlessly blowing cosmic bubbles. The findings aren’t frivolous at all and could help us better understand how black holes interact with their environments and help galaxies evolve. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists discovered that the Milky Way’s central … Read more

James Webb Space Telescope learns how a cosmic phoenix cools off to birth stars

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A purple blob (the same image as header) that shows were the cooling gas is located, as seen by the JWST, and where the jet inflated bubbles are inflated, as seen by other telescopes. Both are in the middle of the purple blob, but the bubbles region is slightly lower.

How do you cool down a phoenix? I don’t mean the mythological birds of flame and rebirth, but rather a cosmic namesake with a fittingly fiery nature. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers may finally have the answer. They used the powerful instrument to investigate the extreme cooling of gas in the Phoenix … Read more

Asteroid-comet chimera Chiron has an unusual ice mix, James Webb Space Telescope finds

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The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered that the centaur called 2060 Chiron is an oddball. The object, which is a minor body that orbits the sun in the expanse between Jupiter and Neptune, has a mixture of ices and gases that make it stand out from other objects in the distant outer solar system. … Read more

James Webb Space Telescope catches monster black hole napping after ‘overeating’ in the early universe

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Napping after overfeeding on food is a dilemma many of us will be fortunate to face on Christmas Day. New research has shown that, billions of years ago, some early black holes also had to nap after overindulging. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers spotted a dormant supermassive black hole that existed just … Read more

‘Our understanding of the universe may be incomplete’: James Webb Space Telescope data suggests we need a ‘new cosmic feature’ to explain it all

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New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have corroborated data from its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, to determine something is missing from our recipe of the cosmos. The JWST conducted its largest survey yet of the accelerating expansion of the cosmos as scientists attempt to discover why the universe is expanding faster … Read more