Last week, astronomers unveiled exciting new images of planets in the HR 8799 and 51 Eridani star systems — and it was all thanks to a creative use of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

It can seem like JWST arrived out of nowhere, but the telescope has been the collective effort of tens of thousands of scientists over decades. Here are some of this year’s best new images.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has recorded breath-taking new images of the iconic Ring Nebula, also known as Messier 57. The images, released today by an international team of astronomers ...

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST ... image of Lynds Bright Nebula 483 (LBN 483), a butterfly-shaped nebula located 650 light-years away. But this stunning cosmic hourglass is no serene ...

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers ... In the new images, the rings turned out to be very bright with respect to the inner shell of the nebula. Furthermore, the observations ...

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured its first direct images of carbon dioxide in a ... or isolated brown dwarfs since the launch of JWST," Pueyo said. Rémi Soummer, who directs the ...

The rapidly spinning neutron star embedded in the center of the nebula ... hourglass with an intricate pattern of "etchings" in its walls. This picture has been composed from three separate images ...

This composite picture of the Helix Nebula was assembled by astronomers by blenindg ultra-sharp NASA Hubble Space Telescope images combined with the wide view of the Mosaic Camera on the National ...

Located 650 light-years from Earth (1 light-year is the distance light travels in one year, approximately 9.46 trillion kilometers), this nebula resembles an hourglass. The two protostars at the ...

Perrin (STScI) Balmer and colleagues took this a step further by capturing innovative coronagraphic images of exoplanets in HR 8799 and 51 Eridani — and they did so by using the JWST's ...