The latest images from the James Webb Space Telescope

A dusty debris disk surrounds red dwarf star AU Mic, 32 light-years away from Earth. The star is marked in white. Debris disks are continuously replenished by collisions of solid dust clumps called planetesimals. The two images were taken using different wavelengths. In the blue image, the disk appears to be shorter, indicating fine dust scatters shorter-wavelength blue light.

Astronomers dug deep into the data from this near-infrared image of the star-forming region in the constellation Carina known as the cosmic cliffs. Webb’s infrared camera penetrated clouds of dust, allowing astronomers to discover signs of two dozen infant stars.

Astronomers discovered a recycling plant for hydrogen gas in Stephan’s Quintet, 270 million light-years away. In the left image, a giant cloud of cold hydrogen gas (green) is stretched into a warm tail of hydrogen over and over again. In the center, a high-speed collision feeds warm gas into cold gas clouds. On the right, hydrogen gas has collapsed, forming what may be a small dwarf galaxy.

Exoplanet LHS 475 b is almost exactly the same size as Earth. Webb's near-infrared spectograph found the planet has no atmosphere. The white data dots are in a pattern consistent with a planet that has no atmosphere (yellow line). If the planet had a pure carbon dioxide atmosphere, the dots would follow the purple line, if it had a pure methane atmosphere it would follow the green line.

These two images show the same galaxy, EGS23205, about 11 billion years ago. In the left image, the Hubble Space Telescope captured a fuzzy shot of the galaxy. But the James Webb Telescope image on the right reveals a spiral galaxy with a clear stellar bar.

The trio of galaxies circled here are "green pea" galaxies. They are rare, small galaxies found much closer to home. These images show the galaxies as they existed when the universe was in its first billion years of its current age of 13.8 billion years.

This cluster of stars, named NGC 346, lies within a nebula. That's a place where stars and planets are formed in clouds packed with dust and hydrogen. The pinker plumes are energized hydrogen as hot as 10,000 degrees Celsius (18,000 degrees Fahrenheit), while the more orange gas represents denser, colder hydrogen at around -200 Celsius.