big bang

This image shows a 'close-up' of the galaxy GN-z11 as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, superimposed on top of another image marking the galaxy's location in the sky.

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James Webb Telescope detects earliest known black hole — it's really big for its age

11:15am January 17, 2024

by Ari Daniel

Data from the James Webb Space Telescope indicate that a galaxy known as GN-z11 has a supermassive black hole at its center — one that's far more massive than astronomers expected.

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These images provided by NASA and the European Space Agency show six candidate massive galaxies, seen 500 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang.

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The Webb telescope finds surprisingly massive galaxies from the universe's youth

2:50pm February 22, 2023

by The Associated Press

At about 600 million years after the Big Bang, they're not the oldest galaxies the telescope has spotted. But they appear as developed as our Milky Way — far further along than researchers expected.

The small red dot highlighted inside the white box on this James Webb Space Telescope image is an early galaxy, seen as it looked just 350 million years after the Big Bang.

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James Webb telescope spots galaxies near the dawn of time, thrilling scientists

4:17pm November 17, 2022

by Nell Greenfieldboyce

Galaxies that existed soon after the Big Bang turn out to be surprisingly bright, a discovery that's both thrilled and puzzled scientists who study how the universe evolved over time.

The James Webb Space Telescope's primary mirror is made up of 18 hexagonal segments. Now that the telescope is in space, mission managers need to perfectly align them so the segments work as one giant mirror.

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The first images from NASA's new space telescope show how it's coming into focus

3:03pm February 11, 2022

by Nell Greenfieldboyce

The James Webb Space Telescope has seen its first starlight, but its 18 mirror segments aren't yet perfectly aligned. As a result, the pictures it's sending back now aren't exactly cosmic eye candy.

The James Webb Space Telescope's primary mirror is illuminated inside a darkened clean room. The entire telescope is now packed inside a rocket, awaiting launch.

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Why some astronomers once feared NASA's James Webb Space Telescope would never launch

5:07pm December 22, 2021

by Nell Greenfieldboyce

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is waiting at its launch site, after years of repeated delays and cost overruns. At one point, the giant new observatory was threatened with cancellation.

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The Pacific Ocean from space. In both liquid and frozen form, water covers most of the Earth's surface, and there's been a debate among scientists about where all the water originated.

Water, Water, Every Where — And Now Scientists Know Where It Came From

5:41pm August 27, 2020

by Nell Greenfieldboyce

Some unusual meteorites suggest that Earth got its water at its start, rather than forming dry and being watered by comets later on.

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An artist's conception of the most-distant supermassive black hole ever discovered, which is part of a quasar from just 690 million years after the Big Bang.

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Massive Black Hole Reveals When The First Stars Blinked On

1:42pm December 06, 2017

by Nell Greenfieldboyce

Scientists have detected a black hole thought to be about 800 million times as massive as our sun that is helping to reveal when the universe filled with starlight.

A supermassive black hole, like the one illustrated here, has been discovered 12.8 billion light years away, at the center of an exceptionally bright quasar.

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Astronomers Discover A Supermassive Black Hole Dating To Cosmic Dawn

5:15pm February 26, 2015

by Hannah Bloch

It's enormous, and it grew relatively quickly — less than 900 million years after the Big Bang.

A visualization of the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB, as detected by ESA's Planck satellite over the entire sky.

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First Stars Fired Up 140 Million Years Later Than Previously Thought

5:01pm February 05, 2015

by Scott Neuman

New data collected from the European Space Agency's Planck telescope shows that the first starlight in the universe occurred about 560 million years after the Big Bang.