All posts tagged: JWST

The sun’s violent death could look like this

The sun’s violent death could look like this

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. The sun still has a long life ahead of it, say five billion years or so. But our star is still on borrowed time. When its inevitable end arrives, the sun’s core will exhaust the last traces of hydrogen fuel and kick off the first stellar death pangs. At that point, our yellow sun will start swelling into a red giant star about 100 times its current size. Over the next one to two billion years, its outer layers will begin shedding as it transitions into its final phase as a white dwarf. The closest planetary neighbors—Mercury, Venus, and possibly even Earth—will be destroyed in the resultant collateral damage. But what about the fate of the solar system’s five other known orbiting planets? …

Yes, JWST should take the deepest deep-field image ever

Yes, JWST should take the deepest deep-field image ever

Published by Jenni Sidey

Each time we’ve looked at the Universe in a fundamentally new way, we didn’t just see more of what we already knew what was out there. In addition, those novel capabilities allowed the Universe to surprise us, breaking records, revolutionizing our view of what was out there, and teaching us information that we never could have learned without collecting that key data. It’s happened many times before, including: with the invention of the telescope, with the development of astrophotography (astronomical photography), with the birth of multiwavelength astronomy, with the advent of space telescopes, with the technique of deep-field imaging, and with the improvements of larger-aperture, longer-wavelength observatories. We gained, in each instance, a better appreciation for what the Universe was made of as well as what it looked like, and a greater understanding of what objects were present within it, in what numbers, and where they could be found. Here in the 21st century, the Hubble Space Telescope — the flagship telescope of the 20th century — now finds itself alongside an array of brilliant …

JWST reveals spiral galaxies’ life cycles, from dust to stars

JWST reveals spiral galaxies’ life cycles, from dust to stars

Published by Miika Tikkanen

If there’s one rule that’s practically universal in astronomy, it’s this: you can only observe the parts of the Universe that your instruments are sensitive to. As a result, when most of us think about the objects that are out there in the cosmos, we think about the components that are easiest to see: things that are bright, close by, and that emit radiation in the form of visible light. When we think of galaxies, we think of the stars within them; when we think of stars, we think primarily of the ones that appear brightest to our eyes and in our telescopes. But there’s a whole Universe out there to explore, and much of it doesn’t emit any visible light at all. This is true even for large spiral galaxies like the Milky Way. We aren’t just a collection of stars, with the occasional “dust lane” of neutral matter that blocks the starlight from behind it, but rather a rich network of gas and dust, dotted with stars and with cavities blown in them …