Where the stars are hiding in N159

N159, formally named LHA 120-N 159, spans about 230 light-years in the image. It is an H II region: a cloud of hydrogen gas that has been ionized, meaning stripped of electrons, by the ultraviolet light of hot, massive young stars. Those stars form when giant clouds of cold hydrogen collapse under their own gravity, and their light makes the gas glow.

Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) shows how those stars shape their surroundings. Their winds carve cavities and push the gas into dense ridges. ESA describes the colors this way:

• Light orange clouds are glowing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, carbon-based molecules.
• Pale blue pools are ionized hydrogen.
• Dark red filaments are cool molecular hydrogen, the densest part of the nebula.

The red filaments matter because they shield new stars from harsh radiation and stellar winds. Zooming in, ESA says, reveals stars as points of light embedded in the filaments and in small pillars of orange gas reaching into the blue bubbles. Eventually those structures will melt away and leave the finished stars behind.

The bright spot on the left is the Papillon Nebula, an exceptionally compact blob of ionized hydrogen thought to be linked to the formation of massive stars. The Hubble Space Telescope first resolved it in 1999.

Sorting young stars from finished ones

The data come from Webb observing programme 5114, which compares stars at different stages of life across N159. A resulting paper reports that astronomers detected extremely dim stars less than a tenth as massive as the Sun. They could also tell large, hot, fully evolved stars apart from young stellar objects, stars still wrapped in the thick clouds where they were born.

The western part of N159 holds more young stellar objects in a more concentrated area. According to ESA, that shows the west is at an earlier stage of collapsing to form stars. With an age below three million years, N159 ranks among the youngest stellar nurseries in the Large Magellanic Cloud and holds thousands of stars that have only just begun to form. Because every stage of the sequence is happening at once, ESA calls it a unique place to watch a collapsing molecular cloud evolve.

A galaxy that resembles the young Universe

The Large Magellanic Cloud has a significantly lower metallicity than the Milky Way. Metallicity is the share of a galaxy’s matter made of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which astronomers call metals. Lower metallicity is closer to conditions in the early Universe, so ESA says studying H II regions there helps researchers learn about star formation in that era. N159 sits alongside the larger N79 region and the Tarantula Nebula among the galaxy’s best-known examples.

Third look at N159 in a year

N159 has been a repeat subject for ESA’s telescopes. ESA/Hubble released two N159 images in late 2025: one on 24 November, covering one side of the cloud, and one on 29 December covering the neighboring region, both credited to ESA/Hubble and NASA with R. Indebetouw. The Webb view is the third picture of the region in about 11 months.

The comparison also shows how long the nebula has been studied. The Papillon Nebula was resolved in 1999, roughly 27 years before this Webb image. Together, the Hubble and Webb pictures give astronomers a growing set of views of star birth in a galaxy with fewer heavy elements than our own.

ESA credits the image to ESA/Webb, NASA and CSA, E. Sabbi and M. Zamani (ESA/Webb), and releases it under CC BY 4.0 or the ESA Standard Licence.

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Four planets in our solar system have rings: Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. These are the four giant planets, the ones far larger than Earth. Saturn’s rings are by far the brightest and the only ones easy to see from Earth; the other three are faint and mostly dark.

The rocky planets closer to the Sun (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) have no rings. For the full line-up of worlds, see the planets in our solar system in order.

Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune side by side

A planetary ring is a flat band of countless separate particles, from dust grains to boulders, each circling the planet on its own orbit. Rings are not solid sheets. The four systems differ widely in brightness, makeup and age.

Figures checked on NASA Science and NASA’s Planetary Fact Sheets on October 22, 2026.

Saturn’s rings: Bright ice reaching 282,000 km from the planet

Saturn’s rings are mostly water ice, which reflects sunlight well and is why they shine. NASA describes the particles as ranging from dust-sized grains to chunks as big as a house, with a few as large as mountains.

The three main rings are named A, B and C. The fainter D, E, F and G rings were found later, so the letters follow the order of discovery, not distance from Saturn. NASA’s fact sheet places the C ring’s inner edge about 74,658 km from Saturn’s center and the A ring’s outer edge about 136,780 km out. The brightest and widest, the B ring, spans roughly 92,000 to 117,500 km.

Between the A and B rings is the Cassini Division, a dark gap about 4,700 km wide. It is easy to spot in a good backyard telescope.

The rings are enormously wide yet extremely thin. NASA gives a typical vertical height of about 10 meters for the main rings. Because of that, the rings seem to vanish when Earth passes through their plane and views them exactly edge-on, as NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day explained in November 2025 using a Cassini image.

Jupiter’s rings are faint dust, found by a spacecraft in 1979

Jupiter’s rings are so dim that nobody knew about them until NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft found them in 1979. NASA calls the discovery a surprise. The particles are small and dark, and the rings are hard to see except when backlit by the Sun. Planetary scientists gauge how dense a ring is with a number called optical depth; NASA lists the main ring at 5 x 10^-6, a tiny value that means almost all light passes straight through.

NASA’s fact sheet lists five components, working outward from the planet:

• The halo, about 89,400 to 123,000 km from Jupiter’s center and roughly 10,000 km thick.
• The main ring, 123,000 to 128,940 km, under about 100 km thick.
• The Amalthea ring, out to 181,350 km.
• The Thebe ring, out to 221,900 km.
• The Thebe extension, out to 280,000 km.

Where does the dust come from? According to NASA, data from the Galileo spacecraft suggest that meteoroids (small space rocks) striking Jupiter’s small inner moons knock loose the dust that forms the rings. In other words, the rings are continually resupplied rather than being a leftover. Jupiter’s moons are covered in our look at which planets have the most moons.

Uranus has 13 rings, mostly narrow and dark

NASA says Uranus is surrounded by 13 faint rings. Nine are the main rings and two are fainter dusty rings that Voyager 2 discovered during its 1986 flyby. Two more faint outer rings were first found with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2007.

NASA’s description of the colors helps tell them apart. The inner rings are mostly narrow and dark grey. The inner of the two outer rings is reddish, similar to dusty rings elsewhere in the solar system. The outermost ring is blue, like Saturn’s E ring.

Uranus takes 84 years to orbit the Sun and spins tipped almost on its side. That is why the Webb telescope image looks like a bullseye of nested rings around the planet rather than a flat band.

Webb’s near-infrared camera took that image on February 6, 2023, with a 12-minute exposure. It shows 11 of the 13 rings. The two faint outer rings found by Hubble are expected to appear in future Webb images, according to NASA. Webb’s view of the dusty rings, previously seen only by Voyager 2 and the Keck Observatory, showed the telescope’s sensitivity to faint material.

Neptune’s rings have clumps of dust called arcs

NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft imaged Neptune’s rings during its encounter in August 1989, and it remains the only spacecraft to have visited the planet. NASA lists at least five main rings, named Galle, Le Verrier, Lassell, Arago and Adams, working outward from the planet.

The outermost, the Adams ring, is unusual. Part of it is bunched into four prominent arcs named Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité and Courage, which NASA describes as clumps of dust. NASA’s fact sheet places the Adams ring about 62,933 km from Neptune’s center, with a width of roughly 15 km. The planet itself has an equatorial radius of 24,766 km, so the ring sits well over twice that far out.

NASA’s Webb telescope imaged Neptune on July 12, 2022, and released the picture on September 21, 2022. The close-up shows the rings in sharp detail along with bright methane-ice clouds in the southern hemisphere and six of the planet’s 14 moons. Because Neptune’s methane gas absorbs near-infrared light, the planet itself looks dark in this image, which makes the thin rings stand out.

How old are the rings, and why do planets have them?

The origin of rings is not settled, and the answer differs by planet. For Saturn, NASA describes the leading explanation as follows: comets, asteroids or moons strayed too close, Saturn’s gravity tore them apart, and the debris spread into orbit as rings.

Age is a separate question. Cassini, a NASA orbiter that studied Saturn from 2004 until the mission ended on September 15, 2017, made 22 dives between the planet and the rings in its final months. Gravity measurements from those dives showed the rings are lighter than expected, which matters because lighter rings would have been darkened by space debris over a shorter time. NASA reported in January 2019 that the rings formed between 10 million and 100 million years ago. That is far younger than Saturn itself, which is roughly 4.5 billion years old.

Not every researcher agrees on that range. Other studies have proposed ages of a few hundred million years or more, so the figure remains an active debate.

For Jupiter, the rings come from moon dust, as described above. For Neptune, NASA says the rings are thought to be relatively young and short-lived.

The best images of each ring system

A few missions supplied the pictures that define each system:

• Saturn: Cassini’s mosaic from July 19, 2013, when the spacecraft slipped into Saturn’s shadow. With the Sun blocked, the rings are backlit, and the image shows the E ring, the G ring, the F ring held narrow by the shepherd moons Pandora and Prometheus, and the faint spokes in the B ring.
• Jupiter: A Galileo mosaic from November 9, 1996, showing the main ring, the halo and the gossamer ring, deliberately overexposed so the faint outer ring shows. NASA’s Juno spacecraft has also photographed the ring from inside it.
• Uranus: Webb’s February 2023 near-infrared view of 11 rings.
• Neptune: Webb’s July 2022 view and Voyager 2’s 1989 images. The Voyager probes are covered in our report on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

Common questions

Which planets have rings?

Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. Saturn’s rings are bright and easy to see; Jupiter’s, Uranus’s and Neptune’s are faint and dark, and some were found only by spacecraft or large telescopes.

Why do planets have rings?

Rings form from debris that stays in orbit around a planet. For Saturn, NASA points to icy bodies that wandered too close and were pulled apart by gravity, while Jupiter’s rings are dust knocked off its small inner moons by meteoroid impacts.

Do any planets in our solar system have rings besides the four giants?

NASA’s pages on the inner planets describe no rings for Mercury, Venus, Earth or Mars. The four giant planets are the ones with confirmed ring systems.

Can you see the rings from Earth?

Saturn’s rings can be seen in a small telescope. The faint rings of Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune need spacecraft or large telescopes such as Webb, and NASA notes that Saturn’s rings can seem to vanish when viewed edge-on.

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From a July 2025 discovery to a closest pass in December

The NASA-funded ATLAS survey telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile, first reported the object to the Minor Planet Center on July 1, 2025. Archived images from ATLAS and from Caltech’s Zwicky Transient Facility showed it as early as June 14, 2025. It is the third interstellar object known, after 1I/’Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, which is where the “3” in its name comes from.

NASA’s facts page puts the comet’s speed at about 137,000 mph (221,000 km/h) when it was found, still inside Jupiter’s orbit. Gravity from the Sun raised that to about 153,000 mph (246,000 km/h) at perihelion, its closest point to the Sun, on Oct. 30, 2025, when it was about 130 million miles (210 million km) from the Sun, just inside Mars’s orbit. Its closest approach to Earth came on Dec. 19, 2025, at about 1.8 au, or 170 million miles (270 million km). NASA states there was no danger to Earth.

The comet’s path is hyperbolic, which means it is moving too fast to be bound by the Sun, and NASA says it is leaving at the same speed it arrived.

A fleet of spacecraft watched one comet

NASA lists observations from an unusually wide set of instruments. Hubble imaged the comet on July 21, 2025, from about 277 million miles away, and again on Nov. 30, 2025. Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph observed it on Aug. 6, 2025. Mars orbiters and rovers took part too: the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera imaged it on Oct. 2, 2025, from about 18.6 million miles away, and the Perseverance rover photographed it on Oct. 4. NASA’s Europa Clipper used its ultraviolet spectrograph on Nov. 6, 2025, and Parker Solar Probe imaged it near the Sun between Oct. 15 and Nov. 5.

NASA says the SPHEREx space telescope recorded infrared light from dust, water, organic molecules and carbon dioxide in the coma, the cloud of gas and dust around the nucleus, during a December 2025 campaign. MAVEN found hydrogen atoms around the comet, and TESS observed it in January 2026 to study its activity and rotation.

Methane, carbon dioxide and a nucleus about 1.3 km in radius

Two peer-reviewed results sharpen the picture. In a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (volume 1001, L11, published April 8, 2026), Matthew Belyakov and colleagues used Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument on Dec. 15-16 and Dec. 27, 2025, when the comet was 2.20 and 2.54 au from the Sun. They report fluorescence from water, carbon dioxide, methane and atomic nickel, and describe the result as the first direct detection of methane in an interstellar object.

The team found the CO2 to water ratio strongly enhanced compared with typical solar system comets, and the methane to water ratio somewhat enriched. Overall outgassing fell significantly over the 12 days between the two epochs, with water dropping more steeply than the other gases. The authors interpret the methane as coming from unprocessed material below the surface, after the outer layers had lost theirs earlier.

On size, a paper by Man-To Hui, David Jewitt and colleagues, accepted by The Astrophysical Journal Letters, used Hubble images from December 2025 to January 2026 to detect the nucleus itself. Assuming a comet-like albedo (the share of light a surface reflects) of 0.04, they derive an effective radius of about 1.3 plus or minus 0.2 km. That sits inside the earlier NASA bounds of 440 meters to 5.6 km for the nucleus diameter, set from Hubble data of Aug. 20, 2025.

What the data still cannot settle

The size depends on an assumed albedo. The team’s measured quantity is the product of albedo and cross-section, about 0.22 plus or minus 0.07 square kilometers, so a different surface reflectivity would change the radius. The same paper reports that, if brightness changes come only from rotation, the nucleus must be elongated by at least 2:1, with a rotation period of about an hour or more.

The Hubble team also found that the comet faded faster after perihelion than it brightened beforehand, with an activity index of 4.5 plus or minus 0.3. Webb’s chemistry is likewise based on two observing dates, so how representative the methane ratios are of the whole nucleus is not known. NASA’s page says the comet formed in another star system and has drifted for “millions or even billions of years”, and gives no more precise age.

Hui and colleagues also infer that interstellar objects like this one probably went unseen before ‘Oumuamua was found, unless the population has a steep size distribution. That is a statistical inference from discovery numbers, not a measured census.

A comet with no return date

NASA says the comet began moving away from the Sun in December 2025 and will leave the solar system permanently, and its hyperbolic orbit means it will not come back. No further close approaches are scheduled. The remaining science will come from the archived data, which is why papers on the observations from late 2025 and early 2026 are still appearing.

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Where the 26.7 billion figure comes from

The figure appeared in “JWST early Universe observations and ΛCDM cosmology”, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (volume 524, pages 3385-3395, 2023). The preprint was submitted to arXiv on September 22, 2023. Earlier versions of this story on spaceandsky.com cited Physical Review D, a journal the paper does not appear in, and that error is corrected here.

Gupta starts from the James Webb Space Telescope’s early galaxies. He writes that galaxies at a redshift of about 15 (redshift measures how much the expansion of space has stretched light, and a higher value means a more distant, earlier time), roughly 0.3 billion years after the Big Bang, look as evolved as galaxies that have existed for about 10 billion years. He argues this is in strong tension with the standard ΛCDM model, the mainstream description of the universe’s makeup and expansion.

His proposed fix is a hybrid. It combines a covarying coupling constants model, in which physical constants change over time, with “tired light,” the old idea that light loses energy on its journey for reasons other than cosmic expansion. By the paper’s own account, a tired-light model alone fails on the isotropy of the cosmic microwave background and on supernova distances. The combined model, Gupta reports, fits the Pantheon+ supernova data and is consistent with the Webb observations. In it the universe is 26.7 billion years old, with 5.8 billion years elapsed at redshift 10 and 3.5 billion years at redshift 20.

What NASA says Webb has and has not shown

Webb’s early galaxies are real, and some were more massive or brighter than expected. NASA’s Webb explainer addresses the age question directly in a section titled “Webb has not disproved the big bang theory.” It says some of the telescope’s earliest findings suggested large galaxies in the early universe, which led some to argue that the accepted age of the universe was wrong. After follow-up studies and comparisons with simulations, the claims were judged overblown. Macarena Garcia Marin, Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said the new observations raise questions but “they have not contradicted our current best models.”

The puzzle Webb poses is about how quickly galaxies and stars formed, not about the clock itself. A faster-than-expected galaxy build-up is a problem for galaxy-formation models, and astronomers can address it by adjusting those models without changing the age of the cosmos.

The Methuselah star no longer outlives the universe

The old story leaned on HD 140283, nicknamed the Methuselah star, which is about 190 light-years away in Libra. In 2013, NASA reported that Hubble measurements gave it an age of 14.5 billion years, with an uncertainty of 0.8 billion years. The central value exceeded the universe’s age, but NASA noted that the refined estimate brought the star’s age range into overlap with 13.8 billion years.

Later work has pushed the star’s age down. A 2024 study in Astronomy & Astrophysics, posted to arXiv in November 2024, used stellar models with tailored chemical abundances and found about 12.3 billion years. A solar-scaled mixture gave about 14 billion years, which the authors describe as in conflict with the universe’s age of 13.77 plus or minus 0.06 billion years. The age of the Methuselah star therefore depends on modeling choices, and the better-fitting models give an age well below that of the universe.

Independent measurements and what is still uncertain

The standard age rests largely on measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the faint afterglow of the Big Bang. The final data release of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), described in arXiv:2503.14452 and accepted by the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, found that ΛCDM fits its temperature and polarization spectra across 19,000 square degrees of sky. Combined with Planck data, CMB lensing and DESI baryon acoustic oscillation data, it gives a Hubble constant of 68.22 plus or minus 0.36 kilometers per second per megaparsec. Adding DESI’s second data release gives 68.43 plus or minus 0.27. The paper’s abstract does not state an age.

Real uncertainty remains elsewhere. The Hubble constant measured from the early universe differs from values measured in the nearby universe, and the origin of the bright early galaxies is still being worked out. Those open questions concern how fast the universe expands and how galaxies grew. They do not currently point to a universe twice as old.

Gupta’s model is also a single-author proposal that has not been confirmed independently, and its age depends on assumptions, such as changing physical constants, that the standard model does not make. Until observations favor those assumptions over the simpler ones, 13.8 billion years remains the age given by NASA.

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From Maisie’s Galaxy to a new distance record

When Webb’s first science images arrived in 2022, one early question was whether the telescope would find galaxies that existing models did not expect. An early answer came from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) survey. In July 2022 its team flagged a candidate in NIRCam images that became known as Maisie’s Galaxy. In February 2023, NIRSpec spectroscopy confirmed it at redshift 11.4, when the universe was 390 million years old, according to NASA.

The galaxy is named for the daughter of CEERS principal investigator Steve Finkelstein. In NASA’s Curious Universe podcast, released July 29, 2025, Webb data scientist Micaela (Mic) Bagley, a member of the CEERS team, said the galaxy was “one of the first real challenges to our understanding of how you can form galaxies.”

Maisie’s Galaxy no longer holds any distance record. According to NASA’s early-universe page, JADES-GS-z14-0 held the record at redshift 14.32 until June 2025, when MoM-z14 was confirmed at 14.44. The result was published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics and announced by NASA, ESA and the Space Telescope Science Institute on January 28, 2026. Hubble’s GN-z11, at about 400 million years after the Big Bang, was the earlier benchmark that hinted at more bright galaxies than expected, according to ESA.

What MoM-z14 shows, and where the models fall short

MoM-z14’s light has traveled for about 13.5 of the universe’s estimated 13.8 billion years, NASA says. The team reports three findings that matter beyond the distance itself.

• Abundance. Bright early galaxies like MoM-z14 are about 100 times more numerous than theoretical studies predicted before Webb launched.
• Chemistry. The galaxy shows high nitrogen, similar to some of the oldest stars in the Milky Way. With so little time since the Big Bang, the researchers suggest that dense early conditions may have produced supermassive stars that made more nitrogen than stars seen nearby.
• Surroundings. It shows signs of clearing the hydrogen fog around itself, which helps map the timeline of reionization, the period when light from early galaxies broke apart the neutral hydrogen gas filling space.

Lead author Rohan Naidu of the MIT Kavli Institute said that the galaxy “looks nothing like what we predicted, which is both challenging and exciting.” MIT postdoctoral researcher Jacob Shen described a growing gap between theory and observation of the early universe.

Two cautions apply. The 100-times figure comes from the team’s comparison with pre-launch theory and rests on a small sample, and Pascal Oesch of the University of Geneva, co-principal investigator of the survey, stressed the need to follow up with more detailed spectroscopy. The nitrogen explanation is also a suggestion, not an established result. Brightness alone does not prove that stars formed faster: the team’s own caveats leave room for several explanations, which is why additional galaxies matter.

Distance estimates also need care. NASA explains that a photometric redshift, estimated from brightness in several filters, is often a broad probability range, and that dusty galaxies at redshift below 5 or cool stars in the Milky Way can mimic the colors of very distant objects. Candidates therefore remain candidates until a spectrum fixes the redshift, as happened for Maisie’s Galaxy and MoM-z14.

Turning static into pictures

Bagley explained in the podcast that Webb’s detectors count electrons knocked loose by photons, not light directly. The raw data, he said, looks like “a TV screen that’s got the static.” Teams remove onboard electronic heat, vibrations, and artifacts from stray light and cosmic rays. Some of those artifacts have informal names such as dragon’s breath and snowballs. Many finished images are mosaics of hundreds of individual frames.

Spectra, which spread light into its wavelengths, carry the composition and temperature information, and they are what turn a candidate into a confirmed galaxy.

Deeper exposures and a wider telescope

Bagley said Webb is “not designed for surveys”: typical exposures last an hour or a couple of hours, and he would like longer exposures on single patches of sky to reach galaxies about 200 million years after the Big Bang. He noted that some teams are already doing deep observations. No galaxy beyond MoM-z14’s distance has been confirmed by NASA or ESA.

The complementary telescope has since left the ground. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on a Falcon Heavy on August 30, 2026 and is heading for an orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 point, a spot of gravitational balance about 1 million miles from Earth. Bagley described Roman as covering about 100 times Webb’s field of view in a single exposure while going “slightly less deep but hugely wide.” The MoM-z14 team expects Roman’s wide field to boost the sample of bright, compact, chemically enriched early galaxies into the thousands, which would test whether MoM-z14 is typical or unusual.

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What the Kansas State study counted

The work comes from Lior Shamir, an associate professor of computer science at Kansas State University. The university announced it on March 12, 2025, and it was accepted by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (DOI 10.1093/mnras/staf292). The preprint, posted to arXiv on February 26, 2025, is titled “The distribution of galaxy rotation in JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey”.

The data come from the GOODS-South field of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, known as JADES. According to the paper, Shamir used images from Webb’s NIRCam, its near-infrared camera, in three infrared bands combined into color images. Only galaxies whose spiral arms allowed a spin direction to be assigned were kept. That left 263 galaxies: 105 turning counterclockwise, the same sense as the Milky Way, and 158 turning clockwise. The paper describes this as about 50% more clockwise galaxies. K-State summarizes it as roughly two-thirds clockwise and one-third counterclockwise.

How spin direction was measured

The classification was done by a computer program, not by eye. The paper says the Ganalyzer algorithm separates each galaxy from the background, converts it to a radial intensity plot, finds the arm pixels and fits their slope to decide which way the arms curve. Galaxies with unclear arms stay unclassified, and ellipticals, smooth galaxies with no spiral arms, are excluded. As a check, the whole field was mirrored and reanalyzed, and the results flipped exactly, as expected for a method with no built-in preference.

The paper gives a one-tailed binomial probability of about 0.0007 for an imbalance this large arising by chance in an even split, equal to about 3.39 sigma, a standard measure of how far a result sits from pure chance. That is below the 5 sigma level usually required in particle physics for a discovery claim.

Two explanations and neither settled

Shamir offers two possibilities. In the K-State release he said: “It is still not clear what causes this to happen.” One explanation is that “the universe was born rotating”, which he links to black hole cosmology, the idea that the universe is the interior of a black hole. He says that, if true, current cosmological theories would be incomplete.

The other is an observational effect. Because of the Doppler shift, galaxies rotating opposite to the Milky Way may look slightly brighter and so be easier to detect. The paper itself notes that the effect should be mild and that rotation speeds alone would not obviously account for a difference of about 50%. If the effect were real and larger than expected, Shamir says, distance measurements for the deep universe would need recalibrating. The paper and release also suggest links to the Hubble tension, the mismatch between measured expansion rates, and to massive galaxies seen very early. These are presented as possibilities, not findings.

Why a cosmic spin bias remains contested

The result is a count in one patch of sky, and the paper lists its limits: a single field, one classification algorithm, and a sample restricted to galaxies with clear arms. Cosmic variance, the chance that one patch of sky is not representative of the whole, and selection effects are not fully assessed. The paper also compares the field with earlier data: a preliminary JWST field analysis found 23 clockwise among 33 galaxies (p about 0.012), while Webb’s First Deep Field showed no significant asymmetry, with 21 counterclockwise and 19 clockwise.

Other researchers have tested the wider claim and reached a different conclusion. Dhruva Patel and Harry Desmond, in a paper published in MNRAS 534(2), compiled public datasets of galaxy spin classifications and tested for dipole-like and hemisphere patterns with Bayesian and frequentist methods. They found the data consistent with isotropy, meaning no preferred direction, to within 3 sigma, and they attribute earlier claims of anisotropy to biased or ad hoc statistics. That analysis concerns other surveys, not the JADES field, so the two results are not a direct contradiction, but they show the broader claim has not been accepted.

A decisive test would need independent classifications, ideally with different methods, across several well-separated sky regions. Kansas State University’s page on the study, updated in February 2026, reports no such confirmation.

Why the black hole idea goes beyond the data

The data do not show that the universe sits inside a black hole. The paper treats the cosmological, galaxy-physics and observational readings as unresolved. A bias in 263 galaxies of one field, at about 3.39 sigma and with independent analyses of other datasets finding isotropy, is not enough to rule out chance or a measurement effect. Until other teams reproduce the count in other fields, the result is best read as an open anomaly in one deep field.

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