The end is near 2025 and the powerful James Webb Space Telescope confirmed its place as the largest astronomical exploration machine ever built.
Over 12 months of continuous observations, the NASA/ESA Observatory revealed scenes that pushed the boundaries of scientific knowledge while redefining the relationship between humanity and the cosmos.
Each image was a piece of a much larger puzzle, that of complete history of the universe.
This selection brings together the 10 most outstanding photographs of the year, sorted by publication and scientific relevance.
1. The Red Spider Nebula
The image of the nebula NGC 6537 showed with unprecedented clarity the ultimate fate of sun-like stars. Webb revealed the full extent of its lobes, real gas bubbles that stretched over thousands of years and reached a length of about three light years.
Infrared light made it possible to identify hydrogen molecules and traces of gas jets rich in ionized iron, tracing a wavy S-shaped structure. This scene confirmed that star death was a dynamic and violent process, far from a quiet farewell.
The lobes shown in blue are traced by light emitted from H₂ molecules containing two bonded hydrogen atoms. These lobes appear as closed, bubble-like structures, each spanning about 3 light-years. Gas escaping from the center of the nebula has inflated these giant bubbles over millennia.
Webb observed a protostellar jet of colossal proportions, propelled by a baby star ten times the mass of the Sun. The stream of gas spanned about eight light-years and was moving at extreme speeds.
The image provided strong evidence for the theory that even massive stars formed from stable disks. In addition, the environment poor in heavy elements made this object an analogue of the first stars in the Universe.
According to NASA, astronomers disagree about how massive stars form. This star appears to support the theory that massive stars have a stable disk of material around them, as evidenced by jets 180 degrees apart. The opposite theory assumes a more chaotic formation process that would lead to a change in the orientation of the disk and therefore also give the appearance that the jets are rotating in different directions.
By combining data from Webb, Hubble and the ALMA radio telescope, astronomers penetrated into the heart of NGC 6302. The new image revealed a dense ring of gas and dust that formed its two distinctive lobes.
Counter-rotating jets and internal bubbles explained why this planetary nebula took on such a symmetrical and complex shape. Webb allowed us to understand how the geometry of the ejected material determined the final appearance of the object.
Planetary nebulae are so named because they are usually round and resemble the planets of early telescopes. But they actually form when dying sun-like stars break off their layers. This planetary nebula is not round but has two lobes that resemble a butterfly.
Observations with the MIRI instrument provided the strongest evidence yet for a giant planet around Alpha Centauri A. The discovery was extraordinary due to the system’s proximity, just four light-years away.
Although the candidate did not harbor life, its discovery demonstrated Webb’s ability to study bright, nearby systems. “Because this system is so close to us, any exoplanets found would give us the best opportunity to collect data on planetary systems other than our own,” said astronomer Charles Beichman.
Alpha Centauri is located at the southern end of the sky and consists of the binary star system Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, both sun-like stars, and the faint red dwarf star Proxima Centauri. Alpha Centauri A is the third brightest star in the night sky. While there are three confirmed planets orbiting Proxima Centauri, confirming the presence of other worlds around Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B has proven difficult.
The telescope returned to and transformed Hubble’s legendary ultra-deep field. After nearly a hundred hours of observation with MIRI and NIRCam, Webb discovered thousands of distant galaxies, many of which were previously hidden.
Some showed an intense redshift and an abundance of dust, suggesting early and vigorous star formation. Using this image, it was possible to reconstruct how the first cosmic structures emerged over billions of years.
These deep observations have discovered more than 2,500 sources in this tiny patch of sky. These include hundreds of extremely red galaxies, some of which are likely massive systems obscured by dust or evolved galaxies with mature stars that formed in the early stages of the universe.
For the first time, Webb has imaged the Sombrero Galaxy in high detail in the near infrared. The outer ring appeared to be fragmented into complex clusters, and observations revealed thousands of globular clusters with unexpectedly different chemical compositions.
These data supported the hypothesis of ancient galactic mergers and offered a more comprehensive look at an amazing star system.
The Sombrero Galaxy lies about 30 million light-years from Earth on the edge of the Virgo cluster of galaxies and has a mass equivalent to about 800 billion suns. This galaxy is edge-on, meaning we see it from the side.
The northern lights of the largest planet in the solar system shone hundreds of times brighter than those on Earth. Webb discovered an unexpected variability in the emission of the H₃+ ion, which is crucial for understanding the interaction between Jupiter’s magnetic field and the solar wind.
The sequence of images showed glowing arcs and rings that changed within minutes, a phenomenon that could not be captured with such precision before the Webb era.
The dancing lights observed on Jupiter are hundreds of times brighter than those on Earth.
The most detailed image of this nebula in the mid-infrared showed sharp rings and internal structures never seen before. At the center, a binary star system explained the complex distribution of gas and dust.
By comparing these observations with historical records, astronomers confirmed how much observational capabilities have advanced in just two centuries.
This nebula has been observed since at least the late 19th century, including by astronomer William Herschel, who also discovered the planet Uranus.
Webb showed with extraordinary clarity a Herbig-Haro object that appeared to be crowned by a distant spiral galaxy.
Herbig-Haro objects are created by jets ejected from a nearby forming star (in this case, outside the image, bottom right). These beams penetrate a dense region of material and generate shock waves. The billowing orange and red features in this image become visible to the Webb telescope as the shockwave material cools and emits light in the visible and infrared wavelengths.
The alignment was only a visual effect, but the image allowed hydrogen molecules, carbon monoxide and energetic dust grains to be tracked. The protostellar jet, moving at hundreds of kilometers per second, provided clues about how young stars changed their immediate surroundings.
The last key image of the year sparked a debate that had been ongoing since 2003. Webb confirmed that stars that are very poor in heavy elements could host long-lived planetary disks. The discovery forced us to rethink models of planet formation in the early universe.
“With Webb we have really strong confirmation of what we saw with Hubble, and we need to rethink how we model planet formation and early evolution in the early universe,” said the study leader Guido De Marchi of the European Space Research and Technology Center in Noordwijk, Netherlands.
Out of its position 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, at the second Lagrange point, Webb observed regions invisible to conventional telescopes. His infrared vision allowed him to fly through clouds of dust, go back more than 13.5 billion years and reconstruct fundamental cosmic processes such as the birth of stars, the death of suns similar to our own, and the formation of galaxies in the universe’s infancy.
In 2025 Webb’s four scientific instruments worked in coordination. NIRCam captured very fine structures in the near infrared, MIRI enabled a deep insight into the mid-infrared, and the spectrographs NIRSpec and NIRISS provided important data on the chemical composition of the observed objects. The result was a series of images that impressed not only for their beauty, but also for the scientific information they conveyed.
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