7 best JWST photos of the past year

It’s hard to believe that JWST has been operational for two years. We got those first images on July 12, 2022, and honestly I will never forget the feeling of seeing them. I was so overwhelmed and in awe of what this observatory could show us — the deep field was cool, they always are. But it was the Carina Nebula that really captured my imagination. I couldn’t get enough of this picture. And JWST’s Pillars of Creation? That’s still my phone background, and I don’t see myself changing it anytime soon!

Over the last two years, we’ve gotten a ton of cool science out of the observatory. But sometimes it’s fun to step back from the science and just look at some gorgeous photos and be in awe of the wonder of the universe around us (though, because it’s me, I’m still going to tell you a little bit about the science of what we’re seeing). I’m going to take you through seven of my favorite photos from JWST’s second year.

(A note: I’ve embedded low-res images into this email, but each image has a link to where you can look at a higher resolution image. I highly recommend clicking through, but be warned that they can be 30+ MB files!)

The Penguin and the Egg (Arp 142)

Let’s start with JWST’s second anniversary photo, released on July 12, 2024! This is Arp 142, which is two galaxies: the Penguin and the Egg, and you can see why these two distinctive galaxies have that name.

In the center is the Penguin, which is actually a distorted spiral galaxy. Because of the interaction with the elliptical galaxy, the Egg, its spiral arms have unwound and its gas and dust were pulled in all directions. This interaction started anywhere from 25 million to 75 million years ago, and it’s produced new star formation, about 100 to 200 stars per year (in contrast the Milky Way produces 6 to 7 new stars per year).

The Egg appears much, much smaller than the Penguin, but the two galaxies actually have a similar mass. That’s why their merger is going so slowly — if one was significantly less massive than the other, it would have been gobbled up more quickly.

If you’re curious what near-infrared versus mid-infrared looks like, the Space Telescope Science Institute was kind enough to provide us with both individually — these were combined to create the final image. But you can see here, the near-infrared image — the glow of dust is really enhanced because remember, near-infrared enhances dust.

And mid-infared peers through it. Look at how different the Egg appears in this photo — it just makes clear how much dust there is surrounding it.

It’s super interesting to see the Hubble and JWST photos side by side here too. You can’t see the structure as well in the Hubble image, which is visible light, you can see this dust obscuring the image. You can see this dust in the JWST near- and mid-infrared image, but it’s much more faint.

Herbig Haro 46/47

This stunning image is two young, energetic stars sending out jets, called Herbig-Haro 46/47 and it’s located about 1,470 light years away. This picture is a composite of six images from JWST’s NIRCam, or near-infrared camera, and the entire image is about 3.1 light years across.

The stars that emitted these bright pinkish-orange jets are buried in the center of the image. It’s hard to see them because they’re buried behind dense gas and dust. They’re only a few thousand years old, and the gas and dust immediately surrounding them continues to feed them as they grow.

All active young stars are surrounded by a circumstellar disk like this, but the larger areas of gas and dust are from jets sent out from this pair of stars. Basically, as stars consume gas and dust and add to their mass, they occasionally overeat and then basically burp out the excess mass to settle the star.

Crab Nebula

THIS PHOTO takes my breath away. This is the Crab Nebula, located about 6,500 light years away, and the field of view here is about 10 light years across. This is a composite image taken in near and mid-infrared.

The red and orange areas that give the images some structure are doubly ionized sulfur, while the ghostly white areas are synchrotron radiation, which is the radiation emitted when charged particles travel at high speeds along curved paths — in this case, the magnetic field lines of the nebula.

You can follow the sulfur and the wispy synchrotron radiation around to where there’s a pulsar hiding in the center of the image.

Cassiopeia A

Cassiopeia A is the youngest supernova remnant that we know about. It was created by the explosion of a star just 340 years ago from our perspective. (Cas A is actually 11,090 light years away, which means that this explosion actually occurred 11,430 years ago, and it took 11,090 years to reach us, but for simplicity the science community just talks about this stuff in terms of Earth’s perspective.)

These are the near-infrared and mid-infrared images side by side. The MIRI image is on the right here. The fire looking red and orange in the MIRI image is where the blast wave from the supernova is interacting with the surrounding gas and dust—this is synchrotron radiation, which looks ghostly white in the near-infrared image.

In the near-infrared photo, you can see the inner shell of the supernova remnant in bright orange and pink. This is from the exploded star. It’s extra bright because of the material it contains — oxygen, argon, neon, and other heavy elements. All in all, this remnant is about 10 light years across.

Uranus

This wide image of Uranus (if you chuckled when I said that, by the way, know that I did while I was writing this) — but this image is actually one of my favorite to come out of JWST because it’s just so simple.

This photo to me is so clear and bright, and Uranus has such distinctive rings in it, that the first time I saw it I wasn’t even sure it was real. It’s so incredible.

Zooming in on the planet, the thing you’re seeing shining on the planet is Uranus’s north polar ice cap, and thanks to JWST’s sensitivity, you can see Uranus’s outer and inner rings.

Scattered around Uranus are 14 of the planet’s moons. The smears in the background are actually galaxies.

PHANGS survey: Face-on spiral galaxies

Honestly I could just pick 10 photos from this series for this video and call it a day. If you haven’t taken a minute to look through JWST’s face-on photos of spiral galaxies, drop what you’re doing and go take a look. They are BREATHTAKING.

You can see MILLIONS of stars across these images.

Closer into the center, thanks to NIRCam, which is JWST’s near-infrared camera, you can see older bluish stars. That’s what creates the blue glow near the center of these galaxies.

In some of the images, you can also see diffraction spikes on the bright center of the galaxy — that’s a good indication of an active supermassive black hole at the center, but they could also be bright central star clusters.

MIRI, or JWST’s mid-infrared instrument, is what shows us the amazing orange and red structure of these spiral galaxies. The bright red stars you see are very young, and still in their cocoons of dust.

One thing that really helps you understand how remarkable these images are is when you look at them side by side with Hubble images, which are taken in visible and ultraviolet light. The difference, both in terms of how they look and in terms of how sharp and detailed they are, is staggering.

NGC 604

I love it when an image sneaks up on you, and this is absolutely one of those. This is NGC 604, not even prominent enough to have a name, and yet LOOK AT IT. It’s unreal!!!

This is a star-forming region located in the Triangulum Galaxy, about 2.73 million light years away. The Triangulum galaxy is one of our closest neighbor galaxies. The bright orange in this image is polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, while the deep red is molecular hydrogen. Ionized hydrogen is the ghostly white.