James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)

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Berkeley Prize: Project UNCOVER

Release date: 17 Sept 2026 12noon ID: 2026-407
STScI Scientists Part of Collaboration Receiving 2027 Berkeley Prize

UNCOVER project revealed JWST’s “little red dots” as mysterious, dusty black holes in the early universe.

Scientists from the Space Telescope Science Institute are members of the collaboration that has been awarded the 2027 Lancelot M. Berkeley–New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy as part of their work with the UNCOVER project. The Berkeley prize is awarded annually for highly meritorious work in advancing the science of astronomy during the previous year.

UNCOVER is a Cycle 1 Treasury program on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. This program conducted ultradeep imaging and spectroscopy of and around Abell 2744, a massive group of galaxies also known as “Pandora's Cluster.”

 

Article link:
https://www.stsci.edu/contents/news-releases/2026/news-2026-407/

Pic Description:
Astronomers estimate 50,000 sources of near-infrared light are represented in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Their light has travelled through varying distances to reach the telescope’s detectors, representing the vastness of space in a single image. A foreground star in our own galaxy, to the right of the image center, displays Webb’s distinctive diffraction spikes. Bright white sources surrounded by a hazy glow are the galaxies of Pandora’s Cluster, a conglomeration of already-massive clusters of galaxies coming together to form a megacluster. The concentration of mass is so great that the fabric of spacetime is warped by gravity, creating an effect that makes the region of special interest to astronomers: a natural, super-magnifying glass called a “gravitational lens” that they can use to see very distant sources of light beyond the cluster that would otherwise be undetectable, even to Webb.

These lensed sources appear red in the image, and often as elongated arcs distorted by the gravitational lens. Many of these are galaxies from the early universe, with their contents magnified and stretched out for astronomers to study. Other red sources in the image have yet to be confirmed by follow-up observations with Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument to determine their true nature. One intriguing example is an extremely compact source that appears as a tiny red dot, despite the magnifying effect of the gravitational lens. One possibility is that the dot is a supermassive black hole in the early universe. NIRSpec data will provide both distance measurements and compositional details of selected sources, providing a wealth of previously-inaccessible information about the universe and how it has evolved over time.

This image was taken as part of the UNCOVER Cycle 1 Treasury program.

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Ivo Labbe (Swinburne), Rachel Bezanson (University of Pittsburgh)
Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

Edited Thursday at 09:05 PM by ➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone

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The 31 Out-of-this-World Winners of Astronomy Photographer of the Year

By Jeremy Gray.  17 Sept 2026

 

Photographer of the Year

Alobaidly’s winning photo, The Quiet Predator, is a beautiful look at the Shark Nebula. The Shark Nebula (LDN 1235) is nearly 650 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus. It is a dark nebula comprised of dense, starlight-blocking dust, which creates its striking shark-like shape.

 

Article link:

[Check out the winners of the 8 primary categories 🏆]

https://petapixel.com/2026/09/17/the-31-out-of-this-world-winners-of-astronomy-photographer-of-the-year/

 

 

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More winning pics:

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NASA's Roman telescopefirst test image 

Space photo of the week

By Brandon Specktor; Edited by Harry Baker, Laura Mondragón

 

Imagine opening your eyes for the first time and seeing that the sky is full of green doughnuts.

 

This was the view that greeted NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which just activated its powerful, 300-megapixel infrared camera for the first time.

 

The telescope, which launched to space on Aug. 30, is partway through a months-long commissioning process, with NASA scientists testing and tuning each of the spacecraft's instruments as it undertakes a million-mile (1.6 million kilometers) journey to Lagrange point L2 — an orbital "parking spot" where the competing gravity of Earth and the sun will hold Roman in place, alongside the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and other scientific spacecraft.

 

Article link:

https://www.livescience.com/space/astronomy/we-are-on-our-way-to-groundbreaking-science-stars-turn-neon-green-in-first-test-image-from-nasas-roman-telescope-space-photo-of-the-week

 

Pic Description:

Roman's first test image shows hundreds of stars as green rings of light. After a few more months of tuning, it will capture images as crisp as Hubble's but 100 times bigger. 

 

The top wavy rows of squares in the image are key to Roman's photo-taking power. Each square represents one of Roman's 18 detectors, which translate photons from distant light sources into electrical signals that encode enormous images of the universe. 

 

Scientists are preparing for the telescope to beam roughly 1.4 terabytes of data — about five to 10 times the storage capacity of an average smartphone — back to Earth every day.

Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Tyler Desjardins (STScI)

 

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Vera Rubin Observatory detects one of the smallest and faintest satellite galaxies ever seen ‪—‬ before the telescope's mission even began

By Abha Jain Edited Brandon Specktor, Laura Mondragón

Published 1 hour ago

 

Astronomers looking at Vera C. Rubin Observatory test data have discovered 'Aquarius IV', believed to be a brand new satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located 350,000 light-years away.

 

In one of the first major discoveries from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, scientists have revealed a previously unknown galaxy orbiting the Milky Way. Described in a study that hasn't been peer-reviewed, the galaxy, named Aquarius IV, is one of the lightest, faintest and farthest satellite galaxies ever seen.

 

Article link:

https://www.livescience.com/space/astronomy/vera-rubin-observatory-detects-one-of-the-smallest-and-faintest-satellite-galaxies-ever-seen-before-the-telescopes-mission-even-began

 

Pic Description:

The infamous Helix Nebula, imaged here by NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer spacecraft, is located deep in the constellation Aquarius. Even farther — beyond the edge of the Milky Way — astronomers using the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have discovered what they believe to be an ultra-dim, never-before-seen dwarf galaxy in orbit around ours, named Aquarius IV. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSC