• BHR71: https://www.webbhorizon.com/app/?obs=2025-04/jw05552-o006_t006_nircam
• HH-903: https://www.webbhorizon.com/app/?obs=2025-06/jw05408-o004_t005_nircam
• TREASURE-CHEST: https://www.webbhorizon.com/app/?obs=2025-05/jw05408-o005_t006_nircam
• SPT-CLJ0354-6032: https://www.webbhorizon.com/app/?obs=2025-01/jw05594-o153_t156_nircam
• SPT-CLJ0646-6236: https://www.webbhorizon.com/app/?obs=2025-01/jw05594-o129_t131_nircam
• HH288 offset: https://www.webbhorizon.com/app/?obs=2025-01/jw04548-o001_t001_nircam
• NGC 1614: https://www.webbhorizon.com/app/?obs=2025-01/jw06035-o001_t001_nircam

Beyond the images themselves, I’m especially curious about two questions:

1. What is this target?
2. Why did JWST observe it?

So I built a small website, Webb Horizon, that processes public JWST/NIRCam filter data into browsables and adds a short briefing for each observation when possible.

Sharing here in case others are curious too. This is an independent project, not an official NASA/STScI site, and the images are my own generated rather than official release images.

https://bsky.app/profile/melina-iras07572.bsky.social/post/3mpxey6faek2k

NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured this view of Thebe, the second largest of Jupiter’s inner moons, during a close pass on May 1, 2026. The spacecraft’s Stellar Reference Unit (SRU) captured this image from a distance of approximately 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) at a resolution of about 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) per pixel.

Thebe resides at the outer edge of Jupiter’s faint ring system and is believed to play a role in the formation of the planet’s “gossamer” ring through the shedding of dust.

While the SRU’s primary function is to image star fields for navigation, its high sensitivity in low-light conditions makes it a powerful secondary science instrument. The SRU has previously been used to discover “shallow lightning” in Jupiter’s atmosphere and to image the planet’s ring system.

A division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, JPL manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott J. Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.​

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

https://science.nasa.gov/photojournal/nasas-juno-misson-captures-jupiter-moon-thebe/

The discovery may lead astronomers to revise when these stellar bars began to emerge in the history of the universe.

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​Image:

Composite false-color image of M1149-BSG-z5, created with JWST imaging data taken in F090W+F115W+F150W (blue), F200W+F277W+F300M (green), and F356W+F410M+F444W (red). Credit: Wang et al., 2026.​

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An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a new massive barred spiral galaxy. The newfound galaxy, designated M1149-BSG-z5, was identified using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The finding was detailed in a paper published June 23 on the preprint server arXiv.

The bars are out there

For astronomers, bars are important structures in galaxies, highly related to galaxy secular evolution. Although bars are common in nearby disk galaxies, at high redshifts, the cosmic environment is drastically different from the local universe, and bar structure formation is expected to be suppressed.

One of the tools that has helped uncover many of these high-redshift barred galaxies is JWST. Observations with this space telescope have found that barred galaxies emerge as early as a redshift of about 4.0, with observed fractions of 3–7% at a redshift of 3.5.

New barred galaxy at the Epoch of Reionization Now, a group of astronomers led by Xiaohan Wang of Tsinghua University in Beijing adds a new galaxy to this list.

"M1149-BSG-z5 was identified in the NIRISS (Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph) imaging parallel field of JWST Cycle-2 program 'Medium-band Astrophysics with the Grism of NIRCam in Frontier Fields,'" the researchers wrote in the paper.

The newfound galaxy M1149-BSG-z5 has a redshift of 5.1 and hosts a stellar bar with a length of approximately 14,700 light-years. This makes it the highest-redshift barred galaxy known to date.

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The properties of M1149-BSG-z5

According to the study, M1149-BSG-z5 has an effective radius of about 8,500 light-years, and its spiral arms extend to a radius of some 17,900 light-years. The mass of the galaxy was estimated to be 28 billion solar masses, and its star-formation rate was found to be at a level of 144 solar masses per year.

Furthermore, the study found that M1149-BSG-z5 hosts an active galactic nucleus (AGN), with a relatively low black-hole-to-stellar mass ratio of about 0.001. This is lower than those of many high-redshift AGNs and comparable to local AGNs.

The astronomers conclude that the properties of M1149-BSG-z5, together with its high metallicity (about 50% solar) and its location on the BPT (Baldwin, Phillips, and Terlevich) diagram, which is used to determine whether a galaxy's gas is being ionized by intense star formation or by an active, supermassive black hole, make it a high-redshift massive, chemically evolved galaxy.

When compared with other galaxies, M1149-BSG-z5 turns out to be larger than typical galaxies at a redshift of about 5.0 and comparable to barred galaxies with redshifts between 2.0 and 4.0. The authors of the paper note that the nearest galaxy to M1149-BSG-z5 is about 69,000 light-years away, which suggests that interaction may play a role in the bar formation of the newly detected system.​

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Source

https://phys.org/news/2026-07-jwst-barred-spiral-galaxy.html?utm_source=webpush&utm_medium=push

Paper

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25022

Full resolution

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FS\_Tauri\_B\_JWST\_NIRCam.jpg

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A bright star at the top. An edge-on disk in yellow at the bottom. The disk has two bright parallel lines separated by a dark line.

https://bsky.app/profile/melina-iras07572.bsky.social/post/3mpogqho7g22j

The galaxy's dark "brim" is ring of dust and cold gas encircling a vast ball of stars.

Dark Energy Camera spies the faint glowing features of Messier 104, known as the Sombrero Galaxy

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Messier 104, nicknamed the Sombrero Galaxy, is a popular target for amateur observing and astronomical research. Its recognizable extended halo, as well as a faint stellar stream, are captured in exquisite detail in this image from the Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera, mounted on the U.S. National Science Foundation Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NSF NOIRLab.

The Sombrero galaxy (Messier 104) is a galactic masterpiece that captivates scientists and astronomy enthusiasts alike. Its intricate system of globular star clusters lends insight into stellar populations, and astronomers are intrigued by the supermassive black hole at its center. Its distinctive visual features and relative brightness make it a favorite among amateur astronomers. The fascinating story of its discovery, involving three esteemed astronomers, has earned it a spot on one of the most important lists of deep sky objects. Today, it stands as one of the most iconic galaxies in the night sky.

Messier 104 resides approximately 30 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo (see finder chart). Spanning an impressive 50,000 light-years across, it is among the largest objects of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster. Despite its grandeur, it appears relatively dim in the night sky — just 

https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2612/

Orange-red clouds and a sea of stars.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HH\_1010\_JWST\_NIRCam3.jpg

https://bsky.app/profile/melina-iras07572.bsky.social/post/3mpm4kt7p7k2f

Blue and red outflows. The prominent protostars are located in a dark filament.

https://bsky.app/profile/melina-iras07572.bsky.social/post/3mplxqc7xdk2f

Images:

1.

​Melina Thévenot

"The radio galaxy 3C 15 (right) with its jet. On the left is the spiral galaxy LEDA 1125302. Image with #JWST NIRCam filter F444W​"

https://bsky.app/profile/melina-iras07572.bsky.social/post/3mpiuc5ltpk2y

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2. ​​

​Melina Thévenot:

"​I tried to combine multiple wavelengths for 3C 15.

Gray is JWST (infrared), orange is VLASS (radio) and violet is Chandra (X-ray).​"

https://bsky.app/profile/melina-iras07572.bsky.social/post/3mpjygaugyc2r

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Melina Thévenot:

"​JWST from MAST VLASS downloaded from legacy viewer: https://www.legacysurvey.org/viewer?ra=9.2675&dec=-1.1523&layer=vlass1.2&zoom=14

Chandra X-ray downloaded from here: cda.cfa.harvard.edu/chaser/ and then combined and blurred with gaussian smooth.

Aligning the images was a bit of a headache, but I think it is a good enough job.​"

https://bsky.app/profile/melina-iras07572.bsky.social/post/3mpjyggxcdk2r

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3.

​Yuval Harpaz

"​Galaxy 3C 15 (left) has a nice jet. The galaxy on the right is LEDA 1125302​"

https://bsky.app/profile/yuvharpaz.bsky.social/post/3mpjlrw45wc2j

“Veni, Vidi, Vici” is a famous phrase attributed to Julius Caesar, dictator of the Roman Empire, describing his quick victory in his short war against Pharnaces II of Pontus at the Battle of Zela, 47 BC. But when NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches later this summer AD 2026, its mission won’t be to conquer territories, but to capture them on a cosmic scale. Armed with a field of view 100 times greater than that of the Hubble Space Telescope, this next-generation powerhouse is designed to see more of the universe in a single snapshot than ever before possible.

Read full story

full resolution https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:3C_273_JWST_NIRCam.jpg

Melina Thévenot

https://bsky.app/profile/melina-iras07572.bsky.social/post/3mp7ofw6hkc24

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3C 273 is a quasar located at the center of a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo. It was the first quasar ever to be identified and is the visually brightest quasar in the sky as seen from the Earth, with an apparent visual magnitude of 12.9, outshining by more than 16 times the entire galaxy that hosts it.

The derived distance to this object is 749 megaparsecs (2.4 billion light-years). The mass of its central supermassive black hole is approximately 900 million times the mass of the Sun.​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3C_273

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A quasar (/ˈkweɪzɑːr/ KWAY-zar) is an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN). It is sometimes known as a quasi-stellar object, abbreviated QSO. The emission from an AGN is powered by accretion onto a supermassive black hole with a mass ranging from millions to tens of billions of solar masses, surrounded by a gaseous accretion disc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasar​

NASA and ESA released a new Webb view of Messier 82, the Cigar Galaxy.

M82 is about 12 million light-years away and is undergoing rapid star formation. Webb's near-infrared view reveals details that were harder to see before, including the galaxy's distended disk structure and millions of individual stars.

That is the part I keep coming back to.

Better tools do not just produce prettier answers.

They change the questions.

When an instrument gets sharper, humans can ask:

- What was hidden by dust?

- What structure did we miss?

- Which theory still fits?

- Which assumption was only there because the old tool could not see enough?

That lesson feels especially clear with Webb. It does not make the universe smaller. It makes the unknown more inspectable.

The image is beautiful, but the real value is what it lets researchers test next about starburst galaxies, dust, stellar populations, and structure inside a system that older observations could not resolve in the same way.

Question:

What Webb observation changed the way you think about galaxies, star formation, or the early universe?

Sources:

- NASA: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-pinpoints-millions-of-stars-within-cigar-galaxy/

- ESA/Webb: https://esawebb.org/news/weic2612/