Becoming fully operational in July 2022,
the James Web Space Telescope was
designed for one primary mission, to use
its sensitive infrared detectors to
pierce the cosmic dust clouds that
permeate the universe, allowing us to
observe the very first stars and
galaxies, and it's off to a good start.
Already some of its early findings are
pushing the boundaries of what we
thought we knew, challenging current
models of how the universe has evolved.
But to look that far back, James Webb
has to peer through a lot of space. And
along the way, it's made some remarkable
discoveries around more familiar
objects, ones that are only visible at
infrared wavelengths. So, let's take a
trip across the cosmos and back through
time. Starting in our solar system and
traveling to astonishingly distant early
galaxies all through the incredible eyes
of web.
Our first stop is in our own cosmic
backyard, Neptune.
Whilst it's usually easily recognizable
thanks to its blue hue, with web it
looks rather different. Doesn't it look
ethereal?
The methane in Neptune's atmosphere
absorbs almost all of the infrared
component of sunlight, meaning very
little is reflected. There simply isn't
much for the James Web Space Telescope
to pick up, making much of the planet
appear dark. But this does have an
upside. Instead, it allows the subtle,
faint glow of Neptune's dusty rings and
high altitude clouds to stand out in
dramatic detail.
These are the clearest images we've ever
taken.
Not only beautiful, they've also
revealed previously unseen ring arcs and
shown us 14 of the ice giants known
moons. And this is just the start.
Scientists are still pouring over these
images to uncover more of Neptune's
secrets. I've already made a video on
some of them if you want to find out
more. But for now, the other secrets of
the outer planets will have to wait. as
web has been focusing its attention on
one of the most compelling objects
currently in our solar system. One that
didn't start its life here. On the 6th
of August 2025, WEB used its near
infrared spectrograph to join the fleet
of telescopes and spacecraft observing
the comet 3i atlas. Its main focus was
to analyze its composition. What Webb
found has opened up a Pandora's box of
possibilities. The comet turned out to
be unusually rich in carbon dioxide and
water vapor. In fact, the ratio was
amongst the highest ever observed in any
comet. It is a messenger from another
star system, having formed in a region
of its original stars planetary disc
where temperatures were cold enough for
CO2 ice to naturally freeze out. By
directly sampling the comet, James Webb
has proven that the basic building
blocks of planetary systems and life are
shared across the galaxy. The common
elements and chemical processes that
created our solar system are likely
universal. But this extraordinary
telescope hasn't just proven useful in
exploring worlds in our cosmic backyard.
It's also part of the hunt for new
worlds beyond our star. And yet again,
it's making some astonishing finds.
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The search for exoplanets is well
underway. Thanks to missions like TESS,
the transiting exoplanet survey
satellite, and Hubble, we've already
found more than 6,000 of them. But
they've only been able to gather so much
information. To find out more about
these strange new worlds, they needed
another instrument, and that came in the
form of James Webb. It's found that our
closest star has been keeping secrets.
Just over four light years away lies the
Alpha Centuri system, a trio of stars
that includes two sunlike stars, Alpha
Century A and B, and the red dwarf,
Proxima Centuri. For decades,
astronomers have suspected that planets
might orbit the two sunlike stars. But
the immense overlapping glare of the
binary pair made them impossible to
detect. Web has overcome this obstacle
using its mid infrared instrument and an
internal chronograph to block the
intense starlight. Much like you might
use a car's visor to block direct
sunlight so you can see on the road,
this device stops the bright starlight
and allows the faint light from the
planets around it to be seen. This is an
incredibly challenging observation
requiring meticulous image processing to
subtract the residual light from both
Alpha Centuri A and his companion star
B. The resulting faint point of light
detected by Meri is now the closest ever
exoplanet candidate to be directly
imaged. It has given a strong evidence
of a potential Saturn mass gas giant
orbiting Alpha Centuri A. And even more
surprisingly, based on orbital
simulations, this gas giant likely
follows an elliptical path within the
stars habitable zone.
While the gas giant itself would not
likely host life as we know it, its
existence confirms that a planetary
system has formed around our nearest
stellar neighbor, providing the
potential for smaller habitable moons or
other terrestrial worlds yet to be
discovered.
Now, if planets and moons form
throughout the universe, which we very
much think is the case, the next
question is how? And this is once again
something the James Webb Space Telescope
can help answer. So let's continue our
journey by diving into the immense
chaotic processes of creation.
The cosmic cliffs, part of the Karina
Nebula, 7,600 lighty years away, and the
iconic Pillars of Creation in the Eagle
Nebula, 6,500 light-years away, may be
familiar sights to some of you, thanks
to the stunning visible light images
captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
But web has given us an entirely
different view. Rather than competing,
Web acts as Hubble's companion, using
the infrared part of the light spectrum
to peer through the thick, obscuring
dust that Hubble's visible light can't
penetrate. In this image of the Pillars
of Creation, Web's near cam view reveals
thousands of previously unseen stars,
including newborns that were completely
hidden within the dark, dusty columns in
Hubble's images. They appear as bright
red orbs lying outside one of the dusty
pillars. Estimated to be just a few
hundred,000 years old. The red glow
comes from energetic hydrogen molecules
created in plasma jets and shock waves
emanating from the new star within. It's
as if the top of the pillar is pulsing
with activity.
Similar processes have also been seen as
the cosmic cliffs. Here, Web's near Cam
has captured crisp details of the
turbulent gaseous structure at the edge
of the nebula.
This sharper look reveals that they are
actively being sculpted and eroded by
intense radiation from massive young
stars just above them. A process much
harder to visualize in Hubble's previous
data. This new ability to peer inside
these cosmic nurseries fundamentally
changes our understanding of how stars
and planets are born. Finally allowing
us to put theories based on simulations
to the test. And what web is finding is
that infant stars are not calm. Their
births are explosive, energetic, and
always spectacular.
Deep in the outskirts of the Milky Way
in a region known as Sharpless 2284,
approximately 15,000 light-years away,
our golden eye found something
extraordinary. A true beer of a protoar
weighing as much as 10 times the mass of
our sun. But not only that, this massive
star is unleashing huge jets of gas and
radiation
known as a bipolar outflow. They are
created as superheated gas falls inward
toward the protoar's core and then is
simultaneously blasted back into space.
Powerful magnetic fields channel this
material into narrow high velocity jets
launched outward at hundreds of
kilometers per second.
Spanning 8 lightyear, these spectacular
birth announcement jets are nearly
double the distance from our sun to the
Alpha Century system and are immensely
powerful, acting like a cosmic snowplow,
pushing away the surrounding molecular
cloud material and creating two much
larger opposing loes of gas. This is a
rare example of what's known as a hair
big harrow object. bright patches of gas
and dust that form when these jets
collide with surrounding material.
Although over 300 hairrow objects have
been observed so far, these jets are
particularly rare due to their immense
size and strength. The stable
symmetrical nature of the outflow
suggests the star is forming via an
ordered disc which provides crucial
evidence for the core accretion model of
massive star birth. What makes this
discovery even more exciting is the fact
that it's located in a star cluster on
the far edge of the galaxy where
metallicity is extremely low. This means
it has far fewer heavier elements than
our sun. And by heavier elements, we
mean anything beyond hydrogen and
helium. This pristine environment almost
perfectly mirrors the conditions of the
early universe. By gazing through its
infrared lens, WEB is giving scientists
crucial clues to something that has long
been a mystery. How the very first
massive stars may have formed.
But Stella Earth isn't the only part of
the creation process we don't fully
understand. Planetary formation is
equally mysterious and yet again
something that James Webb Space
Telescope is illuminating for us.
Once a young star settles, the chaos
around it begins to organize. The
remaining swirling dust and gas becomes
a protolanetary disc, the birthplace of
planets. As giant planets emerge within
these discs, they can form miniature
discs of their own. One example comes
from the CTH B system located 625 lighty
years away. This massive young exoplanet
is encircled by a circumlanetary disc, a
dense ring of material considered a moon
assembly site. It's how we believe
Jupiter's moon system formed long ago.
Using its MIR instrument, Web delivered
the first direct measurements of the
chemical and physical properties of this
potential moon forming disc. Researchers
discovered that the disc is carbonri
containing complex organic molecules
like acetylene and benzene.
This finding represents a major
breakthrough as this carbonrich
chemistry is in stark contrast to the
disc surrounding the host star where
scientists detected water but virtually
no carbon. This chemical difference seen
in a system that has only been evolving
for 2 million years allows us to compare
the ingredients for forming moons in a
distant system to the formation of our
own solar system over 4 billion years
ago. The universe is busy making worlds
and web is giving us an unprecedented
front row seat. Now we've seen how
individual stars are born and how
planets begin to take shape. But these
stories don't happen in isolation. They
play out across the vast, breathtaking
structures of entire galaxies.
In 2024, web focused on 19 nearby spiral
galaxies, delivering images that are
simply astounding.
Forget the science for a moment and just
look at them.
If that isn't art, I don't know what is.
You are looking at the heart of cosmic
creation.
In a galaxy like NGC 628, also known as
the Phantom Galaxy or M74, located
approximately 32 million lighty years
away. Web's view is special because it
highlights specific galactic
ingredients. The blue light marks
millions of older established stars
clustered in the galaxy cores. But it's
the incredible red and orange that
demands attention. This is glowing dust
and gas. Nursery material that threads
through the spiral arms like fiery
motorways. The bright red areas are
stars that haven't fully formed yet,
still encased within their dusty peaks.
You can also see that the spiral arms
are filled with giant spherical shells
or bubbles, massive holes carved out by
the shock waves from ancient exploded
stars.
Analyzing these consistent patterns
across 19 galaxies help scientists
understand how they build, maintain, and
distribute the material necessary for
stars, planets, and with that life.
But even now with all this information,
we still don't have the full picture. We
have one step further to go. Instead of
looking at fully formed old galaxies, we
need to know how and when they began.
For that, we need to go back much
further to the very first stars and
galaxies. It's time to travel back to
the cosmic dawn. some 13.5
billion years ago.
Even with the James Webb Space
Telescope, with all of its spectacular
technical advances, there are limits to
what light can show us. The earliest
light in the universe was released when
space first became transparent just a
few hundred,000 years after the Big
Bang. Beyond that point, the universe
cannot be observed with light. But
luckily, physics gives us ways to see
further than we otherwise could.
Gravitational lensing.
We see this effect when a galaxy cluster
like RXJ2129
located 3.2 billion lighty years away is
in the James Webb's view. This cluster
is so heavy that its gravity warps
spaceime, acting like a cosmic
magnifying glass that bends and focuses
the light from galaxies behind it. In
2023, Web captured a distant supernova
explosion behind RXJ29.
But the telescope didn't just see it
once. Its light was split, creating
multiple images of the same event.
Because the light from each image took a
slightly different magnified route
around the cluster, the supernova
appears as echoes across time. Analyzing
the time delay between each one, or how
much longer the light took along each
path, allows astronomers to precisely
measure vast cosmic distances. This data
is critical for refining the expansion
rate of the universe, also known as the
Hubble constant. There's been some
disagreement over this value in recent
years. You can watch my video on it
here. But who knows, maybe James Webb
can help solve it with measurements like
these.
And so, we have arrived at the very edge
of the observable universe, close to the
dawn of time. Here, web's near and
nearpec instruments as part of the jade
survey have pushed observation to its
limit. The challenge is that light from
the earliest galaxies is severely
affected by the cosmological red shift
phenomenon. This occurs because the
expansion of the universe stretches
light waves as they travel across vast
distances of space, shifting the light
from the visible spectrum all the way to
the infrared. exactly the kind of light
web is designed to capture.
It has uncovered galaxies that existed
far earlier and are far brighter than we
expected and one in particular stood
out. Web's nearspec instrument confirmed
its red shift to be 14.32.
This galaxy, now named Jade's GSZ140,
is seen as it existed only 300 million
years after the Big Bang, making it one
of the earliest known galaxies in the
universe, beaten only by Z14, which
James Webb also spotted in May 2025, and
is 10 million years older. The
prevailing lambda cold dark matter
cosmological model predicts that
galaxies at this epoch, often referred
to as the cosmic dawn, should be small,
dim, and only just beginning to form
their first simplest stars, which is
almost the opposite of this new
discovery. Jade's GSZ140
is too mature, too soon. To grow a
galaxy this large only 300 million years
after the Big Bang, the early universe
must have been forming stars far faster
and more efficiently than any current
model allows. The very existence of this
galaxy and several other similar sources
forces astronomers to confront the
possibility that the foundations of
modern cosmology need a serious
revision.
One explanation for this contradiction
revisits a bold idea first proposed in
2007 by cosmologists Katherine F, Paulo
Gondolo, and Douglas Spoiler. The
existence of dark stars. These
hypothetical first stars are not powered
by nuclear fusion like our sun, but by
the gravitational annihilation of dark
matter particles within their cores.
These potential fair stars could grow
enormous, millions of times the mass of
the sun, cool and be longived, producing
the infrared light web specializes in.
So we could be looking at the signatures
of dark stars. This fundamentally
connects the most distant observations
to the least understood component of our
universe. So yes, the James Webb Space
Telescope has literally shed light on
our universe in a whole new way. It has
revealed a cosmos richer and more
complex than we ever dared to imagine. I
am super excited to see what James Web
finds next. And with potentially more
than 20 years of functionality still on
the clock, there's surely a lot more to
come. Which of those images did you like