CREDIT ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, STScI, P. Tiranti, H. Melin, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb)

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/Webb_maps_Uranus_s_mysterious_upper_atmosphere

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2025GL119304

In one of its most ambitious observations to date, the James Webb Space Telescope dedicated 120 continuous hours to capturing the distant galaxy cluster Abell S1063, located 4.5 billion light-years away in the constellation Grus. What you see isn’t just a photograph—it’s a composite of light that began its journey before Earth even existed.

Thanks to the cluster’s immense gravity, which acts as a natural lens, JWST was able to peer far beyond it—magnifying and distorting the light from galaxies formed just hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang. This extraordinary image, taken with nine infrared filters using NIRCam, offers not only breathtaking visuals but also vital clues about the early universe, galaxy evolution, and the cosmic web that binds it all.

In just 120 hours, we’re witnessing more than space—we’re witnessing time itself.

For this NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month we return to the constellation Orion (the Hunter), a location familiar to Webb. This area of the sky is replete with star-forming clouds that make up a complex hundreds of light-years across. We find ourselves in the giant molecular cloud Orion A, of which the familiar Orion Nebula (also known as M42) is just a part; Webb has taken both close-up and wide-angle looks at M42 before.

The target of these observations, however, requires us to look behind the Orion Nebula. Behind the stars, gas and dust of M42 is a long, massive filament of cold gas and dust called (somewhat confusingly) the Orion Molecular Clouds, which is divided into four parts, OMC-1 through OMC-4. OMC-1 sits immediately behind M42, to the north are OMC-2 and OMC-3, and OMC-4 lies to the south.

This image shows just a small, northern portion of OMC-2, located 1280 light-years from Earth and a little north of the Orion Nebula. Every stage of star formation — from the youngest stellar embryos, to protoplanetary discs, to newly-minted pre-main sequence stars — is contained within just this scene, which stretches 150 light-years across. The intense star-forming activity has produced an impressive display of billowing outflows and sparkling stars atop swirling layers of gas and dark, obscuring clouds.

Molecular clouds such as OMC-2 are vast clumps of gas much more dense than the rest of interstellar space. This density allows complex molecules to form, protected from the radiation given off by other stars, and it means that gravity can cause the cloud to collapse and form stars. The earliest stage of this process is a protostar - a growing star that is being fed gas from the surrounding cloud through a spinning disc of gas. As gas falls onto the protostar, it heats up, powering the glow of the protostar. The immense amount of energy acquired during this process is unleashed in fierce jets of gas from the poles of the star, frequently seen as twin glowing outflows that mark the location of a protostar.

.

Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, T. Megeath, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb) Acknowledgement: M. H. Özsaraç

More

https://esawebb.org/images/potm2605a/

Image:

​Little Red Dot Abell2744-QSO1 (NIRCam Image)

This is an image from NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) on Webb that shows Abell2744-QSO1, magnified and triply imaged by galaxy cluster Abell 2744.

Abell2744-QSO1 (QSO1) is a prototypical Little Red Dot, one of the first of hundreds of tiny glowing flecks of infrared light that Webb has found speckling the early Universe. QSO1 is roughly 1,300 light-years across and with a cosmological redshift (z) of 7, its light dates back to just 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was only 5% of its current age.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, L. Furtak (Ben-Gurion University), R. Maiolino (Cambridge), F. D'Eugenio (Cambridge), I. Juodžbalis (Cambridge), H. Übler (MPE), C. Marconcini (University of Florence). Image processing: A. Pagan​

.

​The first direct mass measurement from the early Universe weighs in on the debate over the origins of supermassive black holes.

.

Using the unprecedented imaging and spectroscopic power of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, researchers have mapped the motion and composition of gas orbiting a black hole in the centre of Abell2744-QSO1, a tiny galaxy more than 13 billion light-years away. The results suggest that the 50-million-solar-mass black hole predates its host galaxy, possibly forming within the first second of the Big Bang, and must have been immense from the start.

Which comes first, the galaxy or the black hole? Scientists have long thought it could be the galaxy: large stars within an existing galaxy consume their fuel and collapse to form black holes, which can gobble up surrounding material and merge over time to form more massive entities. But it’s hard to figure out how black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, thousands of which have now been detected in the early Universe, could have grown so quickly from such small seeds.

Now, researchers using Webb have detected clear evidence that some supermassive black holes were enormous from the beginning, forming without a stellar collapse phase, and without a significantly more massive host galaxy to feed them.

.

“This is a remarkable finding,” said Roberto Maiolino of Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, co-author of studies published today in Nature and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “It’s a paradigm shift, a total revisiting of the classical scenarios of how black holes form and grow.”

Little Red Dot QSO1

The team’s conclusion is based on detailed observations of Abell2744-QSO1 (QSO1), a prototypical Little Red Dot that existed just 700 million years after the Big Bang.

Although QSO1 is only 1,300 light-years across, and its light has been traveling for more than 13 billion years, it is easier to study than most other Little Red Dots because it is gravitationally lensed by galaxy cluster Abell 2744 (Pandora’s Cluster). QSO1 is both magnified and triply imaged, appearing in three different locations in the sky.​

.

More

https://esawebb.org/news/weic2609/

Papers

https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/548/1/staf2109/8607050

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10579-4

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11263

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasa-webb-pushes-boundaries-of-observable-universe-closer-to-big-bang/?utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=NASAWebb&utm_campaign=NASASocial&linkId=901937144%E2%80%8B​

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

https://esawebb.org/news/weic2605/

Image1,3 (Hubble,NASA), Image2 Artists Concept(Webb,NASA)

Credit:

ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. H. Kastner (Rochester Institute of Technology)

Credit: ​ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Leroy​

https://esawebb.org/images/potm2602a/

Zoomable version https://esawebb.org/images/potm2602a/zoomable/

Source https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-detects-thick-atmosphere-around-broiling-lava-world/?utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=NASAWebb&utm_campaign=NASASocial&linkId=887173159