Xiaojing Lin

The night sky in a telescope image looks like a photo taken through a fogged-up window: bright stars are visible, but everything faint drowns in a murky haze. That haze is noise — random interference from electronics, heat, and the atmosphere itself.

Light from the distant Dragon Galaxy has been traveling toward us for more than seven billion years. On its way, it passes by a huge galaxy cluster whose gravity bends the path of light like a lens. As a result, the galaxy appears brighter and larger than it really is, just as a magnifying glass enlarges fine print.

Using the James Webb telescope, astronomers peered into an ancient quasar — the dazzling heart of a galaxy where a giant black hole sucks in matter. It turns out it doesn't just destroy, but also creates: its powerful outflows and shock waves act like a true cosmic mill.

The early Universe is often imagined as a nursery: most galaxies there are amorphous blobs, rowdy and irregular, choking on gas and bursts of star formation.

In a village smithy, the blacksmith pumps the bellows, and sparks fly into the darkness. So too in the galaxy AEON-z5, an active nucleus, like a red-hot forge, hurls metal-enriched material far beyond the stellar disk. The James Webb Space Telescope caught this process just a billion years after the Big Bang, when the universe was still in its infancy.