MIRI Instrument
Webb Scans Vega for Planets
To northern sky watchers, Vega is a familiar sight in the summer sky. It’s one of the brightest stars in…
The Outer Reaches of the Milky Way are Full of Stars, and the JWST is Observing Them
The Milky Way's outer reaches are coming into view thanks to the JWST. Astronomers pointed the powerful space telescope to…
The JWST Reveals the Nature of Dust Around an Active Galactic Nuclei
Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs) are located in the centers of large galaxies like ours. When they're actively feeding, they produce…
Webb Directly Images a Jupiter-Like Planet
The JWST has directly imaged its first exoplanet, a temperate super Jupiter only about 12 light-years away from Earth. It…
Webb Sees a Star in the Midst of Formation
Wherever the JWST looks in space, matter and energy are interacting in spectacular displays. The Webb reveals more detail in…
Something’s Always Been Off About the Crab Nebula. Webb Has Revealed Why!
The Crab Nebula has always fascinated me, albeit amazed me that it doesn’t look anything like a crab! It’s the…
Is the JWST Now an Interplanetary Meteorologist?
The JWST keeps one-upping itself. In the telescope's latest act of outdoing itself, it examined a distant exoplanet to map…
Webb Finds Hints of a Third Planet at PDS 70
The exoplanet census now stands at 5,599 confirmed discoveries in 4,163 star systems, with another 10,157 candidates awaiting confirmation. So…
Webb Blocks the Star to See a Debris Disk Around Beta Pictoris
You think you know someone, then you see them in a slightly different way and BAM, they surprise you. I’m…
Webb Finds Icy Complex Organic Molecules Around Protostars: Ethanol, Methane, Formaldehyde, Formic Acid and Much More
In the quest to understand how and where life might arise in the galaxy, astronomers search for its building blocks.…