James Webb Space Telescope reveals largest-ever panorama of the early universe
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Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have unveiled the largest map of the early universe to date, a sweeping cosmic panorama that offers seasoned scientists and curious stargazers alike a front-row seat to the ancient cosmos.
The images come from COSMOS-Web, the largest observing program the James Webb Space Telescope undertook in its first year. It surveyed a patch of sky equivalent to the width of three full moons placed side-by-side, the telescope's widest observation area to date. The survey stitched together more than 10,000 exposures, revealing nearly 800,000 galaxies, many of which shine from the universe's earliest eras. Harnessing the abundance of data that came from this effort, on Thursday (June 5), the team released the largest contiguous image ever captured by the JWST, along with a free, interactive catalog detailing the properties of each galaxy — a cosmic record that's as vast as it is richly detailed.
"I don't know if the James Webb Space Telescope will ever cover an area of this size again, and so I think it'll be a good reference and a good data set that people will use for many years," Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an astrophysicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and the lead researcher of COSMOS-Web, told Space.com. "The hope is that, now, anybody at any institution can make use of this data for their own science."
When the JWST launched in 2021, the global COSMOS-Web team comprising nearly 50 researchers from institutions around the world was awarded over 200 hours of observation time, the most allocated to any project in the telescope's inaugural year. While many JWST studies zoom in on small, deep slices of sky, COSMOS-Web prioritized breadth, capturing a wider cosmic canvas that brought to light 10 times more galaxies than astronomers anticipated from these early epochs.
"It was incredible to reveal galaxies that were previously invisible at other wavelengths, and very gratifying to finally see them appear on our computers," Maximilien Franco, postdoctoral researcher of astrophysics at the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K., said in a statement.
The JWST's expansive view allows astronomers not only to catalog distant galaxies, but also to study how their characteristics — including size, shape and brightness — are shaped by their cosmic environments, such as whether they reside in isolation or in crowded regions. "That tells us a lot about what influenced them as they evolved," Kartaltepe said.
Alongside the catalog, the COSMOS-Web team has published a series of scientific papers exploring the data. One study, posted to the preprint archive arXiv on Wednesday (June 4), examines the most luminous galaxies at the centers of galaxy groups, tracing how their structure and star forming activity have co-evolved over the past 12 billion years.
A key science goal of the project was to map the earliest structures during the Reionization Era (which fell more than 13 billion years ago) when the first galaxies ignited and began clearing the thick hydrogen fog that blanketed the early cosmos. To achieve this, Kartaltepe and her team plan early galaxies as tracers to measure the size of "reionization bubbles," vast regions where light from stars and galaxies carved clearings in the primordial haze.
"That's not something we finished yet," Kartaltepe said. "But that was the main goal, and something that we're really excited about."
Another paper, which was also posted to arXiv on Wednesday, tests a machine learning technique that can estimate the physical properties of galaxies in the massive dataset. The team also developed a new method to measure the brightness of distant galaxies more accurately. Unlike traditional techniques that simply sum the light within a fixed area, this approach models how light is spread across a galaxy, enabling more precise measurements that allow researchers to combine JWST images with blurrier ground-based data without losing important details.
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Three more studies detail the team's data processing efforts over the past two years, a meticulous process involving aligning and cleaning more than 10,000 individual images. As a brand-new observatory, the JWST brought unexpected challenges. The telescope's images included unforeseen artifacts, such as noise patterns and distortions, which the team had to carefully correct.
Despite these hurdles, the JWST outperformed pre-launch models predicting how faint or distant galaxies it could detect, said Kartaltepe. "The reality turned out to be better — we were able to go deeper than what we expected."
The catalog holds "incredible potential," she added.
"There's still so much we don't know."
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A surprising study revealed biological activity on a distant planet. Weeks later, scientists say there's more to the story
Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. A tiny sign revealed in April seemed like it might change the universe as we know it. Astronomers had detected just a hint, a glimmer of two molecules swirling in the atmosphere of a distant planet called K2-18b — molecules that on Earth are produced only by living things. It was a tantalizing prospect: the most promising evidence yet of an extraterrestrial biosignature, or traces of life linked to biological activity. But only weeks later, new findings suggest the search must continue. 'It was exciting, but it immediately raised several red flags because that claim of a potential biosignature would be historic, but also the significance or the strength of the statistical evidence seemed to be too high for the data,' said Dr. Luis Welbanks, a postdoctoral research scholar at Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration. While the molecules identified on K2-18b by the April study — dimethyl sulfide, or DMS, and dimethyl disulfide, or DMDS — are associated largely with microbial organisms on our planet, scientists point out that the compounds can also form without the presence of life. Now, three teams of astronomers not involved with the research, including Welbanks, have assessed the models and data used in the original biosignature discovery and got very different results, which they have submitted for peer review. Meanwhile, the lead author of the April study, Nikku Madhusudhan, and his colleagues have conducted additional research that they say reinforces their previous finding about the planet. And it's likely that additional observations and research from multiple groups of scientists are on the horizon. The succession of research papers revolving around K2-18b offers a glimpse of the scientific process unfolding in real time. It's a window into the complexities and nuances of how researchers search for evidence of life beyond Earth — and shows why the burden of proof is so high and difficult to reach. Located 124 light-years from Earth, K2-18b is generally considered a worthy target to scour for signs of life. It is thought to be a Hycean world, a planet entirely covered in liquid water with a hydrogen-rich atmosphere, according to previous research led by Madhusudhan, a professor of astrophysics and exoplanetary science at the University of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy. And as such, K2-18b has rapidly attracted attention as a potentially habitable place beyond our solar system. Convinced of K2-18b's promise, Madhusudhan and his Cambridge colleagues used observations of the planet by the largest space telescope in operation, the James Webb Space Telescope, to study the planet further. But two scientists at the University of Chicago — Dr. Rafael Luque, a postdoctoral scholar in the university's department of astronomy and astrophysics, and Michael Zhang, a 51 Pegasi b / Burbidge postdoctoral fellow — spotted some problems with what they found. After reviewing Madhusudhan and his team's April paper, which followed up on their 2023 research, Luque and Zhang noticed that the Webb data looked 'noisy,' Luque said. Noise, caused by imperfections in the telescope and the rate at which different particles of light reach the telescope, is just one challenge astronomers face when they study distant exoplanets. Noise can distort observations and introduce uncertainties into the data, Zhang said. Trying to detect specific gases in distant exoplanet atmospheres introduces even more uncertainty. The most noticeable features from a gas like dimethyl sulfide stem from a bond of hydrogen and carbon molecules — a connection that can stretch and bend and absorb light at different wavelengths, making it hard to definitively detect one kind of molecule, Zhang said. 'The problem is basically every organic molecule has a carbon-hydrogen bond,' Zhang said. 'There's hundreds of millions of those molecules, and so these features are not unique. If you have perfect data, you can probably distinguish between different molecules. But if you don't have perfect data, a lot of molecules, especially organic molecules, look very similar, especially in the near-infrared.' Delving further into the paper, Luque and Zhang also noticed that the perceived temperature of the planet appeared to increase sharply from a range of about 250 Kelvin to 300 Kelvin (-9.67 F to 80.33 F or -23.15 C to 26.85 C) in research Madhusudhan published in 2023 to 422 Kelvin (299.93 F or 148.85 C) in the April study. Such harsh temperatures could change the way astronomers think about the planet's potential habitability, Zhang said, especially because cooler temperatures persist in the top of the atmosphere — the area that Webb can detect — and the surface or ocean below would likely have even higher temperatures. 'This is just an inference only from the atmosphere, but it would certainly affect how we think about the planet in general,' Luque said. Part of the issue, he said, is that the April analysis didn't include data collected from all three Webb instruments Madhusudhan's team used over the past few years. So Luque, Zhang and their colleagues conducted a study combining all the available data to see whether they could achieve the same results, or even find a higher amount of dimethyl sulfide. They found 'insufficient evidence' of both molecules in the planet's atmosphere. Instead, Luque and Zhang's team spotted other molecules, like ethane, that could fit the same profile. But ethane does not signify life. Arizona State's Welbanks and his colleagues, including Dr. Matt Nixon, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of astronomy at the University of Maryland College Park, also found what they consider a fundamental problem with the April paper on K2-18b. The concern, Welbanks said, was with how Madhusudhan and his team created models to show which molecules might be in the planet's atmosphere. 'Each (molecule) is tested one at a time against the same minimal baseline, meaning every single model has an artificial advantage: It is the only explanation permitted,' Welbanks said. When Welbanks and his team conducted their own analysis, they expanded the model from Madhusudhan's study. '(Madhusudhan and his colleagues) didn't allow for any other chemical species that could potentially be producing these small signals or observations,' Nixon said. 'So the main thing we wanted to do was assess whether other chemical species could provide an adequate fit to the data.' When the model was expanded, the evidence for dimethyl sulfide or dimethyl disulfide 'just disappears,' Welbanks said. Madhusudhan believes the studies that have come out after his April paper are 'very encouraging' and 'enabling a healthy discussion on the interpretation of our data on K2-18b.' He reviewed Luque and Zhang's work and agreed that their findings don't show a 'strong detection for DMS or DMDS.' When Madhusudhan's team published the paper in April, he said the observations reached the three-sigma level of significance, or a 0.3% probability that the detections occurred by chance. For a scientific discovery that is highly unlikely to have occurred by chance, the observations must meet a five-sigma threshold, or below a 0.00006% probability that the observations occurred by chance. Meeting such a threshold will require many steps, Welbanks said, including repeated detections of the same molecule using multiple telescopes and ruling out potential nonbiological sources. While such evidence could be found in our lifetime, it is less likely to be a eureka moment and more a slow build requiring a consensus among astronomers, physicists, biologists and chemists. 'We have never reached that level of evidence in any of our studies,' Madhusudhan wrote in an email. 'We have only found evidence at or below 3-sigma in our two previous studies (Madhusudhan et al. 2023 and 2025). We refer to this as moderate evidence or hints but not a strong detection. I agree with (Luque and Zhang's) claim which is consistent with our study and we have discussed the need for stronger evidence extensively in our study and communications.' In response to the research conducted by Welbanks' team, Madhusudhan and his Cambridge colleagues have authored another manuscript expanding the search on K2-18b to include 650 types of molecules. They have submitted the new analysis for peer review. 'This is the largest search for chemical signatures in an exoplanet to date, using all the available data for K2-18b and searching through 650 molecules,' Madhusudhan said. 'We find that DMS continues to be a promising candidate molecule in this planet, though more observations are required for a firm detection as we have noted in our previous studies.' Welbanks and Nixon were pleased that Madhusudhan and his colleagues addressed the concerns raised but feel that the new paper effectively walks back central claims made in the original April study, Welbanks said. 'The new paper tacitly concedes that the DMS/DMDS detection was not robust, yet still relies on the same flawed statistical framework and a selective reading of its own results,' Welbanks said in an email. 'While the tone is more cautious (sometimes), the methodology continues to obscure the true level of uncertainty. The statistical significance claimed in earlier work was the product of arbitrary modeling decisions that are not acknowledged.' Luque said the Cambridge team's new paper is a step in the right direction because it explores other possible chemical biosignatures. 'But I think it fell short in the scope,' Luque said. 'I think it restricted itself too much into being a rebuttal to the (Welbanks) paper.' Separately, however, the astronomers studying K2-18b agree that pushing forward on researching the exoplanet contributes to the scientific process. 'I think it's just a good, healthy scientific discourse to talk about what is going on with this planet,' Welbanks said. 'Regardless of what any single author group says right now, we don't have a silver bullet. But that is exactly why this is exciting, because we know that we're the closest we have ever been (to finding a biosignature), and I think we may get it within our lifetime, but right now, we're not there. That is not a failure. We're testing bold ideas.'
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Jellyfish Lake: Palau's saltwater pool with a toxic bottom and surface waters brimming with millions of jellyfish
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A hidden 'super-Earth' exoplanet is dipping in and out of its habitable zone
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A huge "super-Earth" with an extreme climate that results in it being habitable for only part of its orbit has been discovered orbiting a star 2,472 light years away. And the most remarkable thing is, it was discovered without even being directly detected. The discovery of the exoplanet, a super-Earth called Kepler-735c, is all down to something called transit timing variations, or TTVs for short. Let's set the scene. One of the primary ways of discovering exoplanets is by looking for when they transit, or pass in front of, their star. As they do so, they block a small fraction of that star's light, and, based on the size of this dip in stellar brightness, we can determine how large the transiting planet must be. Indeed, this was how the most successful exoplanet hunter so far, NASA's Kepler space telescope, discovered over 3,300 confirmed exoplanets and thousands more candidates. There are downsides to detecting exoplanets via transits, however. One is that the technique is biased toward planets on short orbits close to their star, which means they transit more often and are easier to see. Transits also require a precise alignment between the orbital plane of a planetary system and our line of sight. Even a small tilt might mean we cannot see planets on wider orbits transiting. Those unseen planets on wider orbits can still make their presence felt, however, in the form of TTVs. Ordinarily, transits are as regular as clockwork, but in some cases astronomers have noticed that a planet's transit can be delayed, or occur ahead of schedule, and that this is being caused by the gravity of other planets tugging on the transiting world. Sometimes we can see those other planets transiting as well — the seven-planet TRAPPIST-1 system is a great example. Often, though, we can't see the planet that is causing the variations, but the size and frequency of the TTVs can tell us about the orbital period and mass of these hidden worlds. One such planet that has been found to experience TTVs is Kepler-725b. It's a gas giant planet orbiting a yellow sun-like star that was discovered by the now-defunct Kepler spacecraft. "By analyzing the TTV signals of Kepler-725b, a gas giant planet with a 39.64-day period in the same system, the team has successfully inferred the mass and orbital parameters of the hidden planet Kepler-725c," Sun Leilei, of the Yunnan Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a statement. Sun is the lead author of a new study revealing the existence of this hidden world. Kepler-725c's mass is quite significant — 10 times greater than the mass of Earth. This places it in the upper echelons of a type of planet called super-Earths — giant, probably rocky worlds. We don't have an example of a super-Earth in our solar system, so we don't really know what such planets are like. Planetary scientists are still grappling with theoretical models that attempt to describe the properties of super-Earth worlds. Would they be wrapped in a dense atmosphere? Could they maintain plate tectonics? How would their higher surface gravity affect the evolution of life? Definitive answers to these questions have not yet been forthcoming. Meanwhile, the planet's orbit is unusual to say the least. It is highly elliptical, with an eccentricity of 0.44. For comparison, Earth's orbit has an eccentricity of 0.0167 and is therefore close to circular; at the other extreme, an orbital eccentricity of 1 would be parabolic. Kepler-7825c's orbit is oval-shaped, meaning that at some points in its orbit it is much closer to its star than at other times. While overall Kepler-725c receives 1.4 times as much heat from its star as Earth does from the sun, this is just the average over the course of its orbit, and at times it is receiving less. If Kepler-725c has an atmosphere, then the difference in solar heating at different times in its orbit could wreak havoc on its climate. In fact, the high orbital eccentricity actually means that the exoplanet only spends part of its orbit in the habitable zone, which is a circular zone around the star at a distance where temperatures are suitable for liquid water on a planet's surface. Related Stories: — Exoplanets: Everything you need to know about the worlds beyond our solar system — Scientists discover super-Earth exoplanets are more common in the universe than we thought — Does exoplanet K2-18b host alien life or not? Here's why the debate continues Does this mean that Kepler-725c is only habitable for part of its 207.5-Earth-day year? What would happen to any life that might exist on the planet during the periods that it is outside of the habitable zone? Again, these are theoretical problems that scientists have been wrestling with, but now the existence of Kepler-725c suddenly makes them very real problems. However, because we do not see Kepler-725c transit, it will not be possible to probe its atmosphere with the James Webb Space Telescope, which uses sunlight filtered through a planet's atmosphere to make deductions about the properties and composition of that atmosphere. Fortunately, there may be more such worlds out there to study. It is expected that when the European Space Agency's PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) spacecraft launches in 2026 as our most sensitive exoplanet-detecting mission yet, it will be able to find many more worlds through TTVs. And, unlike radial velocity and transit measurements, which tend to be biased toward finding short-period exoplanets, TTVs open a window onto planets on wider orbits that are not seen to transit. "[Kepler-725c's discovery] demonstrates the potential of the TTV technique to detect low-mass planets in habitable zones of sun-like stars," said Sun. By doing so, the TTV method will help further the search for life in the universe, if only in providing more statistics as to the numbers of habitable zone planets that are out there. The discovery of Kepler-725c was reported on Tuesday (June 3) in the journal Nature Astronomy.
