Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
STScI Astronomers Help Develop and Operate World's Most Powerful Planet Finder
-
Similar Topics
-
By NASA
3 min read
Help Classify Galaxies Seen by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope!
The Galaxy Zoo classification interface shows you an image from NASA’s Webb telescope and asks you questions about it. Image credit: Galaxy Zoo, Zooniverse. Inset galaxy: NASA/STScI/CEERS/TACC/S. Finkelstein/M. Bagley/Z. Levay/A. Pagan NASA needs your help identifying the shapes of thousands of galaxies in images taken by our James Webb Space Telescope with the Galaxy Zoo project. These classifications will help scientists answer questions about how the shapes of galaxies have changed over time, what caused these changes, and why. Thanks to the light collecting power of Webb, there are now over 500,000 images of galaxies on website of the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project—more images than scientists can classify by themselves.
“This is a great opportunity to see images from the newest space telescope,” said volunteer Christine Macmillan from Aberdeen, Scotland. “Galaxies at the edge of our universe are being seen for the first time, just as they are starting to form. Just sign up and answer simple questions about the shape of the galaxy that you are seeing. Anyone can do it, ages 10 and up!”
As we look at more distant objects in the universe, we see them as they were billions of years ago because light takes time to travel to us. With Webb, we can spot galaxies at greater distances than ever before. We’re seeing what some of the earliest galaxies ever detected look like, for the first time. The shapes of these galaxies tell us about how they were born, how and when they formed stars, and how they interacted with their neighbors. By looking at how more distant galaxies have different shapes than close galaxies, we can work out which processes were more common at different times in the universe’s history.
At Galaxy Zoo, you’ll first examine an image from the Webb telescope. Then you will be asked several questions, such as ‘Is the galaxy round?’, or ‘Are there signs of spiral arms?’. If you’re quick, you may even be the first person to see the galaxies you’re asked to classify.
“I’m amazed and honored to be one of the first people to actually see these images! What a privilege!” said volunteer Elisabeth Baeten from Leuven, Belgium.
Galaxy Zoo is a citizen science project with a long history of scientific impact. Galaxy Zoo volunteers have been exploring deep space since July 2007, starting with a million galaxies from a telescope in New Mexico called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and then, moving on to images from space telescopes like NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and ESA (European Space Agency)’s Euclid telescope. The project has revealed spectacular mergers, taught us about how the black holes at the center of galaxies affect their hosts, and provided insight into how features like spiral arms form and grow.
Now, in addition to adding new data from Webb, the science team has incorporated an AI algorithm called ZooBot, which will sift through the images first and label the ‘easier ones’ where there are many examples that already exist in previous images from the Hubble Space Telescope. When ZooBot is not confident on the classification of a galaxy, perhaps due to complex or faint structures, it will show it to users on Galaxy Zoo to get their human classifications, which will then help ZooBot learn more. Working together, humans and AI can accurately classify limitless numbers of galaxies. The Galaxy Zoo science team acknowledges support from the International Space Sciences Institute (ISSI), who provided funding for the team to get together and work on Galaxy Zoo. Join the project now.
Share
Details
Last Updated Apr 29, 2025 Related Terms
Astrophysics Division Citizen Science Get Involved James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Explore More
2 min read Hubble Visits Glittering Cluster, Capturing Its Ultraviolet Light
Article
4 days ago
5 min read Eye on Infinity: NASA Celebrates Hubble’s 35th Year in Orbit
Article
6 days ago
3 min read Nine Finalists Advance in NASA’s Power to Explore Challenge
Article
6 days ago
View the full article
-
By European Space Agency
Registrations are now open for the European Space Agency’s Living Planet Symposium (LPS) – one of the largest Earth observation conferences in the world. The event will take place on 23–27 June 2025 in Vienna, Austria.
View the full article
-
By NASA
Explore This Section Webb News Latest News Latest Images Blog (offsite) Awards X (offsite – login reqd) Instagram (offsite – login reqd) Facebook (offsite- login reqd) Youtube (offsite) Overview About Who is James Webb? Fact Sheet Impacts+Benefits FAQ Science Overview and Goals Early Universe Galaxies Over Time Star Lifecycle Other Worlds Observatory Overview Launch Deployment Orbit Mirrors Sunshield Instrument: NIRCam Instrument: MIRI Instrument: NIRSpec Instrument: FGS/NIRISS Optical Telescope Element Backplane Spacecraft Bus Instrument Module Multimedia About Webb Images Images Videos What is Webb Observing? 3d Webb in 3d Solar System Podcasts Webb Image Sonifications Team International Team People Of Webb More For the Media For Scientists For Educators For Fun/Learning 6 Min Read NASA Webb’s Autopsy of Planet Swallowed by Star Yields Surprise
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s observations of what is thought to be the first-ever recorded planetary engulfment event revealed a hot accretion disk surrounding the star, with an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene. Webb also revealed that the star did not swell to swallow the planet, but the planet’s orbit actually slowly depreciated over time, as seen in this artist’s concept. Full illustration below. Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, R. Crawford (STScI) Observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have provided a surprising twist in the narrative surrounding what is believed to be the first star observed in the act of swallowing a planet. The new findings suggest that the star actually did not swell to envelop a planet as previously hypothesized. Instead, Webb’s observations show the planet’s orbit shrank over time, slowly bringing the planet closer to its demise until it was engulfed in full.
“Because this is such a novel event, we didn’t quite know what to expect when we decided to point this telescope in its direction,” said Ryan Lau, lead author of the new paper and astronomer at NSF NOIRLab (National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory) in Tuscon, Arizona. “With its high-resolution look in the infrared, we are learning valuable insights about the final fates of planetary systems, possibly including our own.”
Two instruments aboard Webb conducted the post-mortem of the scene – Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph). The researchers were able to come to their conclusion using a two-pronged investigative approach.
Image A: Planetary Engulfment Illustration
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s observations of what is thought to be the first-ever recorded planetary engulfment event revealed a hot accretion disk surrounding the star, with an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene. Webb also revealed that the star did not swell to swallow the planet, but the planet’s orbit actually slowly depreciated over time, as seen in this artist’s concept. NASA, ESA, CSA, R. Crawford (STScI) Constraining the How
The star at the center of this scene is located in the Milky Way galaxy about 12,000 light-years away from Earth.
The brightening event, formally called ZTF SLRN-2020, was originally spotted as a flash of optical light using the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego, California. Data from NASA’s NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) showed the star actually brightened in the infrared a year before the optical light flash, hinting at the presence of dust. This initial 2023 investigation led researchers to believe that the star was more Sun-like, and had been in the process of aging into a red giant over hundreds of thousands of years, slowly expanding as it exhausted its hydrogen fuel.
However, Webb’s MIRI told a different story. With powerful sensitivity and spatial resolution, Webb was able to precisely measure the hidden emission from the star and its immediate surroundings, which lie in a very crowded region of space. The researchers found the star was not as bright as it should have been if it had evolved into a red giant, indicating there was no swelling to engulf the planet as once thought.
Reconstructing the Scene
Researchers suggest that, at one point, the planet was about Jupiter-sized, but orbited quite close to the star, even closer than Mercury’s orbit around our Sun. Over millions of years, the planet orbited closer and closer to the star, leading to the catastrophic consequence.
“The planet eventually started to graze the star’s atmosphere. Then it was a runaway process of falling in faster from that moment,” said team member Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The planet, as it’s falling in, started to sort of smear around the star.”
In its final splashdown, the planet would have blasted gas away from the outer layers of the star. As it expanded and cooled off, the heavy elements in this gas condensed into cold dust over the next year.
Inspecting the Leftovers
While the researchers did expect an expanding cloud of cooler dust around the star, a look with the powerful NIRSpec revealed a hot circumstellar disk of molecular gas closer in. Furthermore, Webb’s high spectral resolution was able to detect certain molecules in this accretion disk, including carbon monoxide.
“With such a transformative telescope like Webb, it was hard for me to have any expectations of what we’d find in the immediate surroundings of the star,” said Colette Salyk of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, an exoplanet researcher and co-author on the new paper. “I will say, I could not have expected seeing what has the characteristics of a planet-forming region, even though planets are not forming here, in the aftermath of an engulfment.”
The ability to characterize this gas opens more questions for researchers about what actually happened once the planet was fully swallowed by the star.
“This is truly the precipice of studying these events. This is the only one we’ve observed in action, and this is the best detection of the aftermath after things have settled back down,” Lau said. “We hope this is just the start of our sample.”
These observations, taken under Guaranteed Time Observation program 1240, which was specifically designed to investigate a family of mysterious, sudden, infrared brightening events, were among the first Target of Opportunity programs performed by Webb. These types of study are reserved for events, like supernova explosions, that are expected to occur, but researchers don’t exactly know when or where. NASA’s space telescopes are part of a growing, international network that stands ready to witness these fleeting changes, to help us understand how the universe works.
Researchers expect to add to their sample and identify future events like this using the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will survey large areas of the sky repeatedly to look for changes over time.
The team’s findings appear today in The Astrophysical Journal.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
To learn more about Webb, visit: https://science.nasa.gov/webb
Downloads
Click any image to open a larger version.
View/Download all image products at all resolutions for this article from the Space Telescope Science Institute.
View/Download the science paper from the The Astrophysical Journal.
Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Hannah Braun – hbraun@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Related Information
Read more about Webb’s impact on exoplanet research
Video: How to Study Exoplanets
Learn more about exoplanets
More Webb News
More Webb Images
Webb Science Themes
Webb Mission Page
Related For Kids
What is the Webb Telescope?
SpacePlace for Kids
En Español
Ciencia de la NASA
NASA en español
Space Place para niños
Keep Exploring Related Topics
James Webb Space Telescope
Webb is the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It studies every phase in the…
Exoplanets
Stars
Universe
Share
Details
Last Updated Apr 10, 2025 Editor Marty McCoy Contact Laura Betz laura.e.betz@nasa.gov Related Terms
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Astrophysics Exoplanets Goddard Space Flight Center Science & Research Stars The Milky Way The Universe View the full article
-
By NASA
In about 5 billion years, our Sun will run out of fuel and expand, possibly engulfing Earth. These end stages of a star’s life can be utterly beautiful – as is the case with this planetary nebula called the Helix Nebula. Astronomers study these objects by looking at all kinds of light.X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/Univ Mexico/S. Estrada-Dorado et al.; Ultraviolet: NASA/JPL; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI (M. Meixner)/NRAO (T.A. Rector); Infrared: ESO/VISTA/J. Emerson; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/K. Arcand This image of the Helix Nebula, released on March 4, 2025, shows a potentially destructive white dwarf at the nebula’s center: this star may have destroyed a planet. This has never been seen before – and could explain a mysterious X-ray signal that astronomers have detected from the nebula for over 40 years.
This view combines X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (magenta), optical light data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (orange, light blue), infrared data from the European Southern Observatory VISTA telescope (gold, dark blue), and ultraviolet data from GALEX (purple) of the Helix Nebula. Data from Chandra indicates that this white dwarf has destroyed a very closely orbiting planet.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/Univ Mexico/S. Estrada-Dorado et al.; Ultraviolet: NASA/JPL; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI (M. Meixner)/NRAO (T.A. Rector); Infrared: ESO/VISTA/J. Emerson; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/K. Arcand
View the full article
-
By NASA
Explore This Section Science Science Activation 2025 Aviation Weather Mission:… Overview Learning Resources Science Activation Teams SME Map Opportunities More Science Activation Stories Citizen Science 2 min read
2025 Aviation Weather Mission: Civil Air Patrol Cadets Help Scientists Study the Atmosphere with GLOBE Clouds
The Science Activation Program’s NASA Earth Science Education Collaborative (NESEC) is working alongside the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) to launch the 2025 Aviation Weather Mission. The mission will engage cadets (students ages 11-20) and senior members to collect aviation-relevant observations including airport conditions, Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Cloud observations, commercial aircraft information (including registration number and altitude), and satellite collocations provided by the NASA GLOBE Clouds team at NASA Langley Research Center. This mission results from a highly successful collaboration between NESEC and CAP as cadets and senior members collected cloud, air temperature, and land cover observations during the partial and total solar eclipses in 2023 and 2024, engaging over 400 teams with over 3,000 cadets and over 1,000 senior members in every state, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico.
The 2025 Aviation Weather Mission will take place from April through July 2025, collecting observations over two 4-hour periods while practicing additional skills, such as flight tracking, orienteering, and data management. So far, over 3,000 cadets in 46 wings (states) have signed up to participate.
Science Activation recently showed support for this mission through a letter of collaboration sent to CAP Major General Regena Aye in early February. NASA GLOBE Clouds and GLOBE Observer are part of the NASA Earth Science Education Collaborative (NESEC), which is led by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) and supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number NNX16AE28A. NESEC is part of NASA’s Science Activation Portfolio. Learn more about how Science Activation connects NASA science experts, real content, and experiences with community leaders to do science in ways that activate minds and promote deeper understanding of our world and beyond: https://science.nasa.gov/learn
Cadets from the Virginia wing making cloud observations as they prepare for the 2025 Aviation Weather Mission. Share
Details
Last Updated Mar 04, 2025 Editor NASA Climate Editorial Team Location NASA Langley Research Center Related Terms
Science Activation Clouds Opportunities For Students to Get Involved Weather and Atmospheric Dynamics Explore More
2 min read Sharing PLANETS Curriculum with Out-of-School Time Educators
Article
1 week ago
3 min read Eclipses to Auroras: Eclipse Ambassadors Experience Winter Field School in Alaska
Article
2 weeks ago
2 min read An Afternoon of Family Science and Rocket Exploration in Alaska
Article
3 weeks ago
Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
James Webb Space Telescope
Webb is the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It studies every phase in the…
Perseverance Rover
This rover and its aerial sidekick were assigned to study the geology of Mars and seek signs of ancient microbial…
Parker Solar Probe
On a mission to “touch the Sun,” NASA’s Parker Solar Probe became the first spacecraft to fly through the corona…
Juno
NASA’s Juno spacecraft entered orbit around Jupiter in 2016, the first explorer to peer below the planet’s dense clouds to…
View the full article
-
-
Check out these Videos
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.