Leindert A. Boogaard

A distant red object usually means one thing: we're seeing a dust veil over a scorching disk falling into a black hole. But when the James Webb split its light into shades, a shadow appeared inside — just like steam from boiling water intercepts rays.

Around the star Epsilon Indi, visible to the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere, orbits a planet the size of Jupiter. The temperature there is like a good freezer: minus 200 degrees Celsius. The James Webb Space Telescope has for the first time directly imaged it and measured the light the planet emits in the thermal range.

The Universe at 700 million years old was a noisy construction site, just beginning to light up. Telescopes caught a signal from that distant epoch: the galaxy REBELS-25, massive and full of stellar fuel.