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 Featured 5 min readNASA Analysis Confirms a Year of Monthly Temperature Recordsarticle2 days ago Hubble Finds Surprises Around a Star That Erupted 40 Years Ago4 min readHubble Finds Surprises Around a Star That Erupted 40 Years Agoarticle3 days ago The specks in this Mars scene were caused by charged particles6 min readNASA Watches Mars Light Up During Epic Solar Stormarticle3 days ago
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 Highlights WL20 group of stars is located in the Rho Ophiuchi star-forming region

	5 min read

		NASA’s Webb Reveals Long-Studied Star Is Actually Twins

		article

			32 mins ago Mars Dunes

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		NASA’s Perseverance Fords an Ancient River to Reach Science Target

		article

			4 hours ago Apollo 1 Monument Dedication

	1 min read

		Apollo 1 Resources

		article

			23 hours ago
 Highlights A woman with long, wavy hair and a bright smile sits at a round table during a formal event, surrounded by other attendees. She is wearing a brown cardigan and a patterned blouse.

	5 min read

		Lakita Lowe: Leading Space Commercialization Innovations and Fostering STEM Engagement

		article

			1 day ago NASA’s Repository Supports Research of Commercial Astronaut Health

	2 min read

		NASA’s Repository Supports Research of Commercial Astronaut Health

		article

			2 days ago NASA astronaut Doug “Wheels” Wheelock and Axiom Space astronaut Peggy Whitson prepare for a test of full-scale mockups of spacesuits developed by Axiom Space and SpaceX’s Starship human landing system developed for NASA’s Artemis missions to the Moon.

	4 min read

		NASA Astronauts Practice Next Giant Leap for Artemis

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 Highlights Amendment 21: A.3 Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry: NSPIRES cover page issue and Delay of Proposal Due Date

	2 min read

		Amendment 21: A.3 Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry: NSPIRES cover page issue and Delay of Proposal Due Date

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			1 day ago 5 min read

		NASA Analysis Confirms a Year of Monthly Temperature Records

		article

			2 days ago North Carolina Volunteers Work Toward Cleaner Well Water

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		North Carolina Volunteers Work Toward Cleaner Well Water

		article

			3 days ago
 Highlights Mars Dunes

	5 min read

		NASA’s Perseverance Fords an Ancient River to Reach Science Target

		article

			4 hours ago Ed Stone, former director of JPL and project scientist for the Voyager mission, died on June 9, 2024. A friend, mentor, and colleague to many, he was known for his straightforward leadership and commitment to communicating with the public.

	5 min read

		Ed Stone, Former Director of JPL, Voyager Project Scientist, Dies

		article

			2 days ago The specks in this Mars scene were caused by charged particles

	6 min read

		NASA Watches Mars Light Up During Epic Solar Storm

		article

			3 days ago
 Featured WL20 group of stars is located in the Rho Ophiuchi star-forming region

	5 min read

		NASA’s Webb Reveals Long-Studied Star Is Actually Twins

		article

			32 mins ago Artist's illustration of a star system near the Sun that is close enough to Earth for exoplanets in their habitable zones to be directly imaged using future telescopes.

	4 min read

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			1 day ago Simulated Roman image full of synthetic galaxies

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 Highlights WL20 group of stars is located in the Rho Ophiuchi star-forming region

	5 min read

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	1 min read

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 Highlights Illustration showing several future aircraft concepts flying over a mid-sized city with a handful of skyscrapers.

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			1 day ago Ed Stone, former director of JPL and project scientist for the Voyager mission, died on June 9, 2024. A friend, mentor, and colleague to many, he was known for his straightforward leadership and commitment to communicating with the public.

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		Ed Stone, Former Director of JPL, Voyager Project Scientist, Dies

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 Featured A team from Iowa accepts its Artemis grand prize award during NASA’s Lunabotics competition on Friday, May 17, 2024, at the Center for Space Education near the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.

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 Highlights Astronaut-packaged cheese sandwiches

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5 min read Early Universe Crackled With Bursts of Star Formation, Webb Shows


NASA Webb Telescope Team
 Among the most fundamental questions in astronomy is: How did the first stars and galaxies form? NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is already providing new insights into this question.
 This infrared image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was taken for the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, or JADES, program. It shows a portion of an area of the sky known as GOODS-South, which has been well studied by the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories. More than 45,000 galaxies are visible here.
***Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Marcia Rieke (University of Arizona), Daniel Eisenstein (CfA). Image processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)***
 Download the full-resolution version from the Space Telescope Science Institute.
  Among the most fundamental questions in astronomy is: How did the first stars and galaxies form? NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is already providing new insights into this question. One of the largest programs in Webb’s first year of science is the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, or JADES, which will devote about 32 days of telescope time to uncover and characterize faint, distant galaxies. While the data is still coming in, JADES already has discovered hundreds of galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 600 million years old. The team also has identified galaxies sparkling with a multitude of young, hot stars. “With JADES, we want to answer a lot of questions, like: How did the earliest galaxies assemble themselves? How fast did they form stars? Why do some galaxies stop forming stars?” said Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona in Tucson, co-lead of the JADES program. **Star Factories** Ryan Endsley of the University of Texas at Austin led an investigation into galaxies that existed 500 to 850 million years after the big bang. This was a crucial time known as the Epoch of Reionization. For hundreds of millions of years after the big bang, the universe was filled with a gaseous fog that made it opaque to energetic light. By one billion years after the big bang, the fog had cleared and the universe became transparent, a process known as reionization. Scientists have debated whether active, supermassive black holes or galaxies full of hot, young stars were the primary cause of reionization. As part of the JADES program, Endsley and his colleagues studied these galaxies with Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument to look for signatures of star formation – and found them in abundance. “Almost every single galaxy that we are finding shows these unusually strong emission line signatures indicating intense recent star formation. These early galaxies were very good at creating hot, massive stars,” said Endsley. These bright, massive stars pumped out torrents of ultraviolet light, which transformed surrounding gas from opaque to transparent by ionizing the atoms, removing electrons from their nuclei. Since these early galaxies had such a large population of hot, massive stars, they may have been the main driver of the reionization process. The later reuniting of the electrons and nuclei produces the distinctively strong emission lines. Endsley and his colleagues also found evidence that these young galaxies underwent periods of rapid star formation interspersed with quiet periods where fewer stars formed. These fits and starts may have occurred as galaxies captured clumps of the gaseous raw materials needed to form stars. Alternatively, since massive stars quickly explode, they may have injected energy into the surrounding environment periodically, preventing gas from condensing to form new stars. **The Early Universe Revealed** Another element of the JADES program involves the search for the earliest galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 400 million years old. By studying these galaxies, astronomers can explore how star formation in the early years after the big bang was different from what is seen in current times. The light from faraway galaxies is stretched to longer wavelengths and redder colors by the expansion of the universe – a phenomenon called redshift. By measuring a galaxy’s redshift, astronomers can learn how far away it is and, therefore, when it existed in the early universe. Before Webb, there were only a few dozen galaxies observed above a redshift of 8, when the universe was younger than 650 million years old, but JADES has now uncovered nearly a thousand of these extremely distant galaxies. The gold standard for determining redshift involves looking at a galaxy’s spectrum, which measures its brightness at a myriad of closely spaced wavelengths. But a good approximation can be determined by taking photos of a galaxy using filters that each cover a narrow band of colors to get a handful of brightness measurements. In this way, researchers can determine estimates for the distances of many thousands of galaxies at once. Kevin Hainline of the University of Arizona in Tucson and his colleagues used Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument to obtain these measurements, called photometric redshifts, and identified more than 700 candidate galaxies that existed when the universe was between 370 million and 650 million years old. The sheer number of these galaxies was far beyond predictions from observations made before Webb’s launch. The observatory’s exquisite resolution and sensitivity are allowing astronomers to get a better view of these distant galaxies than ever before. “Previously, the earliest galaxies we could see just looked like little smudges. And yet those smudges represent millions or even billions of stars at the beginning of the universe,” said Hainline. “Now, we can see that some of them are actually extended objects with visible structure. We can see groupings of stars being born only a few hundred million years after the beginning of time.” “We’re finding star formation in the early universe is much more complicated than we thought,” added Rieke. These results are being reported at the 242nd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Albuquerque, New Mexico. *The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.*  ***Laura BetzNASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.laura.e.betz@nasa.gov*** ***Christine PulliamSpace Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.cpulliam@stsci.edu***


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 Page Last Updated:
								Sep 08, 2023
							Page Editor:
								Marty McCoy
												Responsible NASA Official:
							Abigail Bowman