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Great Observatories: James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope is part of NASA's fleet of "Great Observatories," which also includes the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. Webb studies every phase in the history of our universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth to the evolution of our own solar system.

Rising from turbulent waves of dust and gas is the Horsehead Nebula, otherwise known as Barnard 33, which resides roughly...
A clumpy dome of blueish-gray clouds rises about a third of the way from the bottom. Above it, streaky, translucent red wisps brush upward to about halfway up the image. The top half of the image is the black background of space with one prominent, bright white star with Webb’s 8-point diffraction spikes. Additional stars and galaxies are scattered throughout the image, although very few are seen through the thick clouds at bottom, and all are significantly smaller than the largest star.
The Crab Nebula, the result of a bright supernova explosion seen by Chinese and other astronomers in the year 1054,...
The Crab Nebula, the result of a bright supernova explosion seen by Chinese and other astronomers in the year 1054, is 6,500 light-years from Earth. At its center is a neutron star, a super-dense star produced by the supernova. As it rotates at about 30 times per second, its beam of radiation passes over the Earth every orbit, like a cosmic lighthouse. As the young pulsar slows down, large amounts of energy are injected into its surroundings. In particular, a high-speed wind of matter and anti-matter particles plows into the surrounding nebula, creating a shock wave that forms the expanding ring seen in the movie. Jets from the poles of the pulsar spew X-ray emitting matter and antimatter particles in a direction perpendicular to the ring. This image show the X-ray data from Chandra along with infrared data from the Webb space telescope.
An enormous mosaic of Stephan’s Quintet is the largest image to date from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, covering about...
An enormous mosaic of Stephan’s Quintet is the largest image to date from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, covering about one-fifth of the Moon’s diameter. It contains over 150 million pixels and is constructed from almost 1,000 separate image files. The visual grouping of five galaxies was captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).
NGC 1333 is a nearby star-forming region in the Perseus constellation. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope surveyed a large portion...
A nebula made up of cloudy gas and dust in the form of soft and wispy clouds and, in the center, thin and highly detailed layers pressed close together. Large, bright stars surrounded by six long points of light are dotted over the image, as well as some small, point-like stars embedded in the clouds. The clouds are lit up in blue close to the stars; orange colors show clouds that glow in infrared light.
NGC 602 is a star cluster that lies on the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, one of the closest...
Near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy roughly 200 000 light-years from Earth, lies the young star cluster NGC 602, which is featured in this new image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. This image includes data from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-InfraRed Camera) and MIRI (Mid-InfraRed Instrument). The local environment of this cluster is a close analogue of what existed in the early Universe, with very low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The existence of dark clouds of dense dust and the fact that the cluster is rich in ionised gas also suggest the presence of ongoing star formation processes. This cluster provides a valuable opportunity to examine star formation scenarios under dramatically different conditions from those in the solar neighbourhood. [Image description: A star cluster is shown inside a large nebula of many-coloured gas and dust. The material forms dark ridges and peaks of gas and dust surrounding the cluster, lit on the inner side, while layers of diffuse, translucent clouds blanket over them. Around and within the gas, a huge number of distant galaxies can be seen, some quite large, as well as a few stars nearer to us which are very large and bright.]
In this image of the Serpens Nebula from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers found a grouping of aligned protostellar...
A rectangular image with black vertical rectangles at the bottle left and top right to indicate missing data. A young star-forming region is filled with wispy orange, red, and blue layers of gas and dust. The upper left corner of the image is filled with mostly orange dust, and within that orange dust, there are several small red plumes of gas that extend from the top left to the bottom right, at the same angle. The center of the image is filled with mostly blue gas. At the center, there is one particularly bright star, that has an hourglass shadow above and below it. To the right of that is what looks a vertical eye-shaped crevice with a bright star at the center. The gas to the right of the crevice is a darker orange. Small points of light are sprinkled across the field, brightest sources in the field have extensive eight-pointed diffraction spikes that are characteristic of the Webb Telescope.
Auroras and hazes glow in this composite image of Jupiter taken by the James Webb Space Telescope's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam).
Webb NIRCam composite image of Jupiter from three filters
Our James Webb Space Telescope has captured a new image of the famous Pillars of Creation—first imaged by the Hubble...
Layers of semi-opaque red colored gas and dust, bottom left, with three prominent pillars rise toward the top right. The left pillar is the largest and widest, the second and third pillars are set off in darker shades of brown and have red outlines.
The Cassiopeia A supernova remnant has been observed for more than 2 million seconds since the start of the Chandra...
This image features the Cassiopeia A supernova, an expanding ball of matter and energy ejected from an exploding star. Here, rings of neon blue and brilliant white emit veins of polished gold. The rings and their arching veins encircle a place of relative calm at the center of the supernova remnant. This hole at the center of the circle, and the three-dimensionality conveyed by the rings and their arching veins, give this image of Cassiopeia A the look of a giant, crackling, electric blue donut. X-rays detected by Chandra show debris from the destroyed star and the blast wave from the explosion.
The distorted spiral galaxy at center, the Penguin, and the compact elliptical at left, the Egg, are locked in an...
Arp 142, two interacting galaxies, observed in near- and mid-infrared light. At left is NGC 2937, nicknamed the Egg. Its center is the brighter and whiter. There are six diffraction spikes atop its gauzy blue layers. At right is NGC 2936, nicknamed the Penguin. Its beak-like region points toward and above the Egg. Where the eye would be is a small, opaque yellow spiral. The Penguin’s distorted arms form the bird’s beak, back, and tail. The tail is wide and layered, like a beta fish’s tail. A semi-transparent blue hue traces the Penguin and extends from the galaxy, creating an upside-down U over top of both galaxies. At top right is another galaxy seen from the side, pointing roughly at a 45-degree angle. It is largely light blue. Its length appears approximately as long as the Egg’s height. One foreground star with large, bright blue diffraction spikes appears over top of the galaxy and another near it. The entire black background is filled with tiny, extremely distant galaxies.
Rho Ophiuchi is a cloud complex filled with gas and stars of different sizes and ages.
Rho Ophiuchi, a cloud complex filled with gas, and dotted with stars. The murky green and gold cloud resembles a ghostly head in profile, swooping down from the upper left, trailing tendrils of hair. Cutting across the bottom edge and lower righthand corner of the image is a long, narrow, brick red cloud which resembles the ember of a stick pulled from a fire. Several large white stars dot the image. Many are surrounded by glowing neon purple rings, and gleam with diffraction spikes.
Spiral galaxy NGC 3627.
The galaxy NGC 3627 appears pitched at an oblique angle, tilted from our upper left down to our lower right. Much of its face is angled toward us, making its spiral arms, composed of red and purple dots, easily identifiable. Several bright white dots ringed with neon purple speckle the galaxy. At the galaxy’s core, where the spiral arms converge, a large white and purple glow identified by Chandra provides evidence of a supermassive black hole.
The Orion Nebula.
The young star nursery at the heart of the Orion Nebula resembles a dense, stringy, dusty rose cloud, peppered with thousands of glowing golden, white, and blue stars. Layers of cloud around the edges of the image, and a concentration of bright stars at its distant core, help convey the depth of the nebula.
Featured in this new image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope is the dwarf galaxy NGC 4449. This galaxy,...
A close view of the central area of a dwarf galaxy. A huge number of stars fill the whole galaxy as tiny glowing points. They are brightest around the galaxy’s shining core. Thick clouds of gas and dust billow out across the scene, curling like moving flames. They glow in warm colours following their location: orange around the galaxy’s core, and around glowing star clusters in the bottom-left, and dark red elsewhere.
This image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) of star-forming region NGC 604 shows how stellar winds...
At the center of the image is a nebula on the black background of space. The nebula is comprised of clumpy, red, filamentary clouds. At the center-right of the red clouds is a large cavernous bubble, and at the center of the bubble there is an opaque blueish glow with speckles of stars. At the edges of the bubble, the dust is white. There are several other smaller cavernous bubbles at the top of the nebula, including two tiny cavities at the top center of the image. There are thousands of stars that fill the surrounding area outside the nebula, most of them are yellow or white. At 11 o’clock and 6 o’clock there are extremely bright stars with 8 diffraction spikes. There are also some smaller, red stars and a few disk-shaped galaxies scattered across the image.
It’s oh-so-easy to be mesmerized by this spiral galaxy. Follow its clearly defined arms, which are brimming with stars, to...
Webb’s image of NGC 4254 shows a densely populated face-on spiral galaxy anchored by its central region, which has a light blue haze that takes up about a quarter of the view. In this circular core is the brightest blue area. Within the core are populations of older stars, represented by many pinpoints of blue light. Spiny spiral arms made of stars, gas, and dust also start at the center, largely starting in the wider area of the blue haze. The spiral arms extend to the edges, rotating counterclockwise. The spiraling filamentary structure looks somewhat like a cross section of a nautilus shell. The arms of the galaxy are largely orange, ranging from dark to bright orange. Scattered across the packed scene are some additional bright blue pinpoints of light, which are stars spread throughout the galaxy. In areas where there is less orange, it is darker, and some dark regions look more circular.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s new view of Cassiopeia A (Cas A) in near-infrared light is giving astronomers hints at...
Cassiopeia A, a circular-shaped cloud of gas and dust with complex structure. The inner shell is made of bright pink and orange filaments studded with clumps and knots that look like tiny pieces of shattered glass. Around the exterior of the inner shell, particularly at the upper right, there are curtains of wispy gas that look like campfire smoke. The white smoke-like material also appears to fill the cavity of the inner shell, featuring structures shaped like large bubbles. Around and within the nebula, there are various stars seen as points of blue and white light. Outside the nebula, there are also clumps of yellow dust, with a particularly large clump at the bottom right corner that appears to have very detailed striations.
The NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s reveals a portion of the Milky Way’s dense core...
A crowded region of space, full of stars and colorful clouds, more than twice as wide as it is tall. A funnel-shaped region of space appears darker than its surroundings with fewer stars. It is wider at the top edge of the image, narrowing towards the bottom. Toward the narrow end of this dark region a small clump of red and white appears to shoot out streamers upward and left. A large, bright cyan-colored area surrounds the lower portion of the funnel-shaped dark area, forming a rough U shape. The cyan-colored area has needle-like, linear structures and becomes more diffuse in the center of the image. The right side of the image is dominated by clouds of orange and red, with a purple haze.
6,500 light-years away lies the Crab Nebula, the remains of an exploded star. While this target has been well-studied by...
The Crab Nebula is an oval nebula with complex structure against a black background. On the nebula’s exterior, particularly at the top left and bottom left, lie curtains of glowing red and orange fluffy material. Its interior shell shows large-scale loops of mottled filaments of yellow-white and green, studded with clumps and knots. Translucent thin ribbons of smoky white lie within the remnant’s interior, brightest toward its center. The white material follows different directions throughout, including sometimes sharply curving away from certain regions within the remnant. A faint, wispy ring of white material encircles the very center of the nebula. Around and within the supernova remnant are many points of blue, red, and yellow light.
This new image of the Ring Nebula from Webb's MIRI (Mid-InfraRed Instrument) reveals particular details in the concentric features in...
This image of the Ring Nebula appears as a distorted doughnut. The nebula’s inner cavity hosts shades of red and orange, while the detailed ring transitions through shades of yellow in the inner regions and blue/purple in the outer region. The ring’s inner region has distinct filament elements.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has observed the well-known Ring Nebula in unprecedented detail. Formed by a star throwing off...
Alt text: This image of the Ring Nebula appears as a distorted doughnut. The nebula’s inner cavity hosts shades of blue and green, while the detailed ring transitions through shades of orange in the inner regions and pink in the outer region. The ring’s inner region has distinct filament elements.
This image taken by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope shows one of a total of 19 galaxies targeted for...
This image taken by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope shows one of a total of 19 galaxies targeted for study by the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby Galaxies (PHANGS) collaboration. Nearby barred spiral galaxy NGC 1433 takes on a completely new look when observed by Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). NGC 1433’s spiral arms are littered with evidence of extremely young stars releasing energy and, in some cases, blowing out the gas and dust of the interstellar medium they plough into. Areas that once appeared dark and dim in optical imaging light up under Webb’s infrared eye, as clumps of dust and gas in the interstellar medium absorb the light from forming stars and emit it back out in the infrared. Webb’s image of NGC1433 is a dramatic display of the role that dynamic processes within the forming stars, dust, and gas play in the larger structure of an entire galaxy. At the centre of the galaxy, a tight, bright core featuring a unique double ring structure shines in exquisite detail, revealed by Webb’s extreme resolution. In this case, that double ring is actually tightly wrapped spiral arms that wind into an oval shape along the galaxy’s bar axis. NGC 1433 is classified as a Seyfert galaxy, a galaxy relatively close to Earth that has a bright, active core. The brightness and lack of dust in the MIRI image of NGC 1433 could hint at a recent merger or even collision with another galaxy.In the image of NGC 1433, blue, green, and red were assigned to Webb’s MIRI data at 7.7, 10 and 11.3, and 21 microns (the F770W, F1000W and F1130W, and F2100W filters, respectively). MIRI was contributed by ESA and NASA, with the instrument designed and built by a consortium of nationally funded European Institutes (The MIRI European Consortium) and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in partnership with the University of Arizona.[Image Description: A large galaxy takes up the entirety of the image. The core is mostly bright white, but there are also swirling, detailed structures that resemble water circling a drain. There is white and light blue colored dust that emanates from the core’s center, but it is tightly contained to the core. The rings are wispy and highlight filaments of dust around cavernous black bubbles. The dust in the outer rings contains dots that are navy blue, pinkish, reddish, and white.]
Star cluster NGC 346.
Star cluster NGC 346.
Detail of the globular cluster M92 captured by Webb's NIRCam instrument. This field of view covers the lower left quarter...
Square image filled with blue, white, yellow, and red points of light of different size and brightness, most of which are stars. The larger and brighter stars show Webb’s distinctive diffraction pattern consisting of eight spikes radiating from the center. At the lower right is a scale bar labeled 2 light-years. The scale bar is two-ninths the width of the image, and shows that throughout the image, the distance between adjacent stars is a fraction of one light-year. The density of stars and brightness of the image is greatest in the upper left portion of the image where the stars are much closer together, and decreases gradually toward the bottom right where they are farther apart. The number of larger, brighter stars also appears to decrease from the upper left toward the lower right.
An international team of astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has obtained an in-depth inventory of the deepest, coldest...
A black background filled with galaxies in shades of a red, orange and blue. In the foreground are blue smokey wisps. On the left top, the wisps are orange and white. Four bright points of light, three orange and one a white-orange mix at the bottom left.
This region of star formation contains the Pillars of Creation, which was made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope. Chandra...
This composite image features a region of star formation known as the Pillars of Creation. Here, tall columns of grey gas and dust emerge from the bottom edge of the image, stretching toward our upper right. Backed by dark orange and pink mist, the cloudy grey columns are surrounded by dozens of soft, glowing, dots in whites, reds, blues, yellows, and purples. These dots are young stars emitting X-ray and infrared light. Churning with turbulent gas and dust, the columns lean to our right with small offshoots pointing in the same direction. The misty glow, colorful stars, and lifelike grey dust formations combine to create an image of yearning cloud creatures at dusk, reaching for something just out of frame.
An enormous swirling vortex of hot gas glows with infrared light, marking the approximate location of the supermassive black hole...
An enormous swirling vortex of hot gas glows with infrared light, marking the approximate location of the supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy.
The "Tarantula Nebula" (officially known as 30 Doradus) is available in a composite image of Chandra and JWST data for...
The "Tarantula Nebula" (officially known as 30 Doradus).
The James Webb Space Telescope spies the spiral galaxy NGC 7469, located 220 million light-years from Earth in the constellation...
NGC 7469, a face-on galaxy, with gray spiral arms, sprinkled with bright red patches of star formation.
By taking a closer look at one of Webb’s first images, the iconic Cosmic Cliffs, scientists have found dozens of...
The Carina Nebula imaged by Webb.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known...
distant galaxies appear as bright glowing spots in this Webb telescope image, with some smeared by gravitational lensing; foreground stars appear bright with six-pointed diffraction spikes, owing to the shape of Webb's mirrors
Webb’s Fine Guidance Sensor Provides a Serendipitous Preview
Webb’s Fine Guidance Sensor test image
On Sept. 21, 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope delivered the clearest view of Neptune’s rings in more than 30...
Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) image of Neptune, taken on July 12, 2022, brings the planet’s rings into full focus for the first time in more than three decades.
Webb teamed up with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, observing the ringed planet in complementary wavelengths of light to give us...
Webb captured this new image of galaxy Messier 58, in both the near and mid-infrared, as part of a treasury...
Using Webb data, researchers mapped locations of dark matter (shown in blue) across a field of nearly 800,000 galaxies. This...
For the first time, an international team of astronomers have mapped the vertical structure of Uranus’s upper atmosphere, uncovering how...
A new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope of a portion of the Helix Nebula highlights comet-like knots, fierce...
In this Webb image of galaxy cluster MACS J1149, we can see over 300 confirmed galaxies (and potentially hundreds more)...