Project
A large infrared space observatory launched in 2021, operated by NASA with ESA and CSA, studying distant galaxies, exoplanets, and star formation.
Astronomers used JWST data and a technique called transmission strings to map WASP-17b's atmosphere as a ring with raised 'gems'. The temperature contrast they found matches theory, so the result is a test of the method.
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COMPASS, an ALMA survey of 11 low-mass protostars, detected methanol masers around more than half of them, the first at that mass. A deuterium-bearing form of methanol turned up at only one of the 11, IRAS 4A2, so that result is a single case.
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JWST's NIRSpec recorded the same unexplained 1.6-micrometer emission line twice in a Hubble Ultra Deep Field patch in 2023. Earlier Hubble and JWST data show nothing at the spot, and a brief flare from something too dim to see is one possible reading.
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Cornell and Bristol researchers applied transmission strings to JWST data and found WASP-17b's atmosphere more extended on one side. The shape matches theoretical predictions, so the study is a first test of the method on one planet.
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Webb detected candidate supernova AT 2026abck at redshift 5.017, an estimated four to 10 rest-frame days after it exploded, in a field with no gravitational lensing. Its type is still open, since the team has no spectrum of the transient.
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IPAC researchers report that Webb data show galaxy cluster XLSSC 122, 10.4 billion light-years away, holds an unusually dense concentration of matter. Caltech IPAC's summary says that suggests some cosmic structures may have developed much faster than current models predict.
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Astronomers led by Manisha Caleb report FRB 20240304B, the most distant fast radio burst yet, emitted about 3 billion years after the Big Bang. Its host is a dwarf galaxy 1,000 times less massive than expected, and the team favors a magnetar as the source.
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Brittany Miles's team used 11 hours of JWST spectra to watch water clouds thicken and thin on WISE 0855, the coldest known brown dwarf. The same spectra separate those cloud changes from gases stirred up by convection, two signals that older photometry blended together.
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MeerKAT and JWST traced fast radio burst FRB 20240304B to a galaxy seen 3 billion years after the Big Bang, more than doubling the distance record. The small, star-forming host is one data point for young magnetars as the source of at least some of these flashes.
Perspective Coverage
5 publishersReality
Megatron simulations suggest the region that became a Milky Way-like galaxy held thousands of small merging galaxies in the universe's first 2 billion years. Its galaxies come with predicted spectra that can be checked directly against James Webb Space Telescope data.
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University of Chicago researchers report Webb evidence of an atmosphere on HD 3167 b, a rocky planet with a 24-hour orbit. Planets that close to a star are expected to lose gas to stellar wind and high-energy light, so the result could help explain how rocky worlds keep their atmospheres.
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Kate Su's team combined Webb and Spitzer spectra to sort 21 extreme debris disks around young stars into silica-rich and silica-poor groups. NASA says the minerals encode how violent each dust-making collision was, a possible check on Moon-formation ideas.
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ESA says Webb's infrared image of NGC 7129 shows a 3.5-light-year cavity carved by outflows from one young star of 5 to 8 solar masses. The link between that star and the cavity rests on ESA's reading of a single snapshot.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Cosmologists' simulations suggest primordial magnetic fields may have sped hydrogen formation, shifting the 67 km/s/Mpc rate read from the CMB. That gives the 6 km/s/Mpc Hubble tension a physical cause.
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Harley Katz's team at the University of Chicago ran three years of simulations showing the Milky Way assembling from thousands of smaller galaxies. Published across six papers, the models can now be checked against what Webb actually records.
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University of Arizona astronomers used JWST to detect carbon and oxygen flowing out of three galaxies seen 500 million years after the Big Bang. The result suggests heavy elements spread earlier than astronomers expected, though three galaxies picked from hundreds of spectra cannot yet show how common such outflows were.
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Oxford-led astronomers using DESI found 546 bulgeless galaxies with feeding black holes sit on the same black hole-to-stellar mass relation as bulged ones. A bulge usually signals past mergers, so the result favours growth fed by bars and spiral arms, if that proxy holds.
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Kate Su's team used Webb and Spitzer spectra of 21 extreme debris disks to infer that about a third come from vaporizing impacts between Mars-sized bodies. Silica marks those violent cases, and it turns up only around stars younger than 300 million years.
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University of Bath-led MEGATRON team published four papers arguing early-universe models must track starlight, gas and new elements together. Their simulations suggest simpler models understate how stellar radiation and chemistry shape the gas around young galaxies.
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Helium reported escaping LHS 1140b, a habitable-zone planet 1.7 times Earth's size, may signal a long-lived secondary atmosphere around a red dwarf. The result is tenuous and the planet could still be a mini-Neptune, so its use as a test of whether red-dwarf worlds keep their air depends on confirmation.
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Science · September 2, 2026 · Confirmed8 publishers
Science · September 23, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers
Science · September 15, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers
Science · September 17, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers
Leadership · August 29, 2026 · One report1 publisher
Science · August 20, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers