A project to map the earliest structures of the universe has found 15,000 more galaxies in its first snapshot than captured in an entire deep field survey conducted 20 years ago.

The James Webb Space Telescope, the new preeminent observatory in the sky, saw about 25,000 galaxies in that single image, dramatically surpassing the nearly 10,000 shown in the Hubble Space Telescope’s Ultra Deep Field Survey (Opens in a new tab). Scientists say that little piece of the space pie represents just four percent of the data they’ll discover from the new Webb survey by the time it’s completed next year.

“When it is finished, this deep field will be astoundingly large and overwhelmingly beautiful,” said Caitlin Casey, a University of Texas at Austin astronomer co-leading the investigation, in a statement (Opens in a new tab).

Learning that your whole life is a lie while you’re trapped in space is a tough combo.

Private searches.

Sand dunes of many shapes and sizes are common on Mars. In this example, the dunes are almost perfectly circular, which is unusual. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona.

Sand dunes of many shapes and sizes are common on Mars.

Mars is the second smallest planet in our solar system and the fourth planet from the sun. It is a dusty, cold, desert world with a very thin atmosphere. Iron oxide is prevalent in Mars’ surface resulting in its reddish color and its nickname “The Red Planet.” Mars’ name comes from the Roman god of war.

Webb space telescope’s mid-infrared capabilities allowed scientists to see past gas and dust clouds to observe previously obscured details in faraway galaxies.

A team of researchers has been able to see inside faraway spiral galaxies for the first time to study how they formed and how they change over time, thanks to the powerful capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope.

“We’re studying 19 of our closest analogs to our own galaxy. In our own galaxy we can’t make a lot of these discoveries because we’re stuck inside it,” says Erik Rosolowsky, professor in the University of Alberta Department of Physics and co-author on a recent paper — published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

That’s some tough parenting.

Stars commonly engulf planets, but some can survive and even outlive the star.

Astronomers found compelling evidence that the water in our solar system came from interstellar space. This water around a distant protostar is quite similar to the water found in our solar system, and on Earth.

Astronomers report the discovery of two new exoplanets orbiting a bright sun-like star about 175 light years away. The newfound alien worlds, designated HIP 104,045 b and HIP 104,045 c, were classified as a Jupiter analog and a super Neptune planet, respectively. The finding was detailed in a paper published March 2 on the pre-print server arXiv.

The radial velocity (RV) method to detect an exoplanet is based on the detection of variations in the velocity of the central star, due to the changing direction of the gravitational pull from an unseen exoplanet as it orbits the star. Thanks to this technique, more than 600 exoplanets have been detected so far.

Now, a team of astronomers led by Thiago Ferreira of the University of São Paulo in Brazil, reports the detection of two new exoplanets using the RV method. They observed a solar-type star HIP 104,045 with the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph on the 3.6m telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in La Silla, Chile. The observations, conducted as part of the Solar Twin Planet Search (STPS) program, resulted in the discovery of two massive extrasolar worlds.