Announcements

17 December 2025: - By Chris Evans, Javier Espinosa Aranda, Victor Fernández Rubio, María Arévalo Sánchez, Deborah Baines, Monica Fernández Barreiro, Marcos López-Caniego Alcarria, Bruno Merín Martin, Laura Masselos, Paule Sonnentrucker - The European Hubble Space Telescope (eHST) Science Archive is hosted at ESA’s European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC). As part of ESA’s multi-decade partnership with NASA on the mission, the eHST archive provides a European mirror of all public Hubble data in the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). We are pleased to announce the release of a new version of eHST, which now includes science products from the Hubble Spectroscopic Legacy Archive (HSLA), that were released by STScI in November 2025. In brief, the HSLA provides co-added spectra of each individual target observed by Hubble’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS). To maximise the signal-to-noise and wavelength coverage for …

17 December 2025: -By Chris Evans, María Arévalo Sánchez, Deborah Baines, Javier Espinosa Aranda, Victor Fernández Rubio, Monica Fernández Barreiro, Alvaro Labiano Ortega, Marcos López-Caniego Alcarria, Bruno Merín Martin, Paule Sonnentrucker- The European James Webb Space Telescope (eJWST) Science Archive is hosted at ESA’s European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC). Building on the decades-long partnership between NASA and ESA on Hubble, and now together with the CSA, the eJWST archive provides a European mirror of all public Webb data in the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute. We are delighted to announce the release of a new version of eJWST. To allow for effective and intuitive exploration of Webb data, and to ensure a consistent look and feel between the mission archives, the new version features a similar interface as the European Hubble Space Telescope (eHST) archive. The new eJWST includes a one-line search functionality on the …

17 December 2025: - By Owen Higgins - 2025 was another busy year for us in the ESA/Hubble/Webb science outreach team. Webb has had another highly productive year of science operations, resulting in many new insights that we have been able to share with the public — too many to fully list here! A particular highlight this year was some fascinating new views of magnetic activity on Solar System planets: scientists were able to capture the auroral activity on Neptune for the first time, while on the magnetically-active Jupiter, astronomers observed the aurorae over several hours with Webb and watched the auroral region change in real time. Webb also made great progress this year in observing worlds beyond our Solar System. In the Alpha Centauri system — a Sun-like star just 4 light-years away — astronomers found strong evidence of a giant planet, while Webb’s first direct image discovery of an exoplanet came …

17 December 2025: To celebrate another year of exciting images and discoveries from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, ESA/Hubble and ESA/Webb have released a new calendar for 2026 that showcases beautiful imagery from both missions. The 2026 calendar features a selection of images from Press Releases (from Hubble and Webb), Hubble Pictures of the Week and Webb Pictures of the Month published throughout 2025. These include imagery of planets, star clusters, galaxies, and more. It can now be accessed electronically for anyone to print, share and enjoy (please see the links provided below). The images featured in the calendar are as follows: Cover: IRAS 04302+2247 is a planet-forming disc located about 525 light-years away in a dark cloud within the Taurus star-forming region. This beautiful Webb image shows an example of a protostar (a young star that is still gathering mass from its environment) surrounded by …

27 October 2025: -By Emma Curtis-Lake (Hertfordshire), on behalf of the JADES Consortium- The JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) is a collaboration between the Guaranteed Time Observation teams of the NIRCam and NIRSpec instruments. The goal of JADES is to reveal the physical properties of galaxies in the young Universe, from when it was less than two billion years old up to the formation of the first galaxies right after the Cosmic ‘Dark Ages’. We are delighted to announce the fourth JADES data release (DR4), which presents the complete NIRSpec spectroscopic dataset. This release contains 5190 spectra across the GOODS-North and GOODS-South fields, including the iconic Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The sample spans the extended wavelength coverage of NIRSpec, from 0.8 to 5.5 microns, with both low-dispersion prism observations (R~30-300) and medium-resolution gratings (R~1000). Nearly 2700 galaxies were also observed with the high-resolution G395H grating (R~2700), enabling detailed studies of galaxy kinematics …

27 October 2025: -By Chris Evans- I am delighted to announce the latest in the series of ESA-sponsored conferences, in collaboration with STScI, which highlight science with Hubble and Webb. The conference, “Enriching the Universe: From Primordial Nucleosynthesis to Exoplanet Atmospheres”, will be held in Vienna, Austria on 13 to 16 April 2026, shortly ahead of the 36th anniversary of Hubble’s launch. With Hubble and Webb both in science operations, we are unlocking many of the mysteries of the Universe, in what is a tremendously exciting time for astronomy. A key topic that underpins a broad range of current research is the chemical evolution of the Universe, from the production of heavy elements in the first stars, the enrichment over successive generations of star-formation and stellar death in galaxies, and the complex chemistry in the interstellar medium and stellar environments which build-up the molecules we are now probing in exoplanet and solar system …

17 June 2025: -By Chris Evans- Following Webb’s launch on an Ariane 5 rocket in December 2021, the ESA/Webb science outreach team has featured a new image each month in the ESA/Webb Picture of the Month series. The series showcases remarkable Webb images from across the broad range of its scientific targets, alongside the popular ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week series, which recently celebrated its fifteenth anniversary. The ESA/Webb March 2025 Picture of the Month was of a particularly striking Einstein Ring, with a beautiful example of strong lensing in the galaxy cluster field SMACSJ0028.2-7537. The NIRCam data were obtained as part of the Strong Lensing and Cluster Evolution (SLICE) survey, a Cycle 3 Survey programme led by Guillaume Mahler at the University of Liege. For the image release, the NIRCam observations were combined with visible Hubble-ACS observations from a past Snapshot programme (PI: Harald Ebeling). The ESA/Webb outreach team is always on …

17 June 2025: -By Chris Evans- The Rocky Worlds Director’s Discretionary Time (DDT) programme combines Hubble and Webb observations to search for evidence of atmospheres on rocky exoplanets orbiting around M-dwarf stars. Starting in Webb’s Cycle 4, this new DDT programme will use 500 hours of MIRI observations to investigate the ‘Cosmic Shoreline’ concept of which rocky planets are able to retain an atmosphere. The observations will target transiting systems at their secondary eclipses to measure the dayside flux of the planet via their eclipse depths. If an atmosphere is present, there will be more energy recirculation so we expect a lower dayside flux, i.e. a smaller eclipse depth. The MIRI observations will be obtained at 15 microns, which probes the presence of a broad CO2 band that, if present, further reduces the flux and will give a stronger detection of an atmosphere. To complement the Webb data, Hubble will obtain ultraviolet spectroscopy …

20 March 2025: -By Chris Evans & Macarena Garcia Marin- We are excited to share that the inaugural JWST Summer School will be held at STScI on 4–15 August 2025, on the topic of high-redshift transients with JWST. With its superb sensitivity and infrared capabilities, JWST has opened a new and exciting window onto time-domain science. By detecting redder and fainter sources, JWST is allowing us to explore the early Universe better than ever before, including being able to probe the epoch of reionisation and the first stars. It is also providing us with insights into high-energy physics and explosion mechanisms. This is a timely topic for the 2025 school as the year ahead will bring a wealth of new data relevant for time-domain astronomy, including the planned start of science operations with the Rubin Telescope, large new extragalactic JWST datasets becoming publicly available (e.g. from COSMOS-3D and NEXUS), and the expectation of …

20 March 2025: -By Chris Evans, Paule Sonnentrucker & Macarena Garcia Marin- We are delighted to announce a Special Session on the JWST Data Pipeline at this year’s European Astronomical Society (EAS) meeting in Cork, Ireland. The session will be held on Friday 27 June, and will be a hands-on opportunity for researchers from across Europe to build their expertise and confidence with JWST data. The session is primarily intended for researchers who have yet to work with JWST data, or have had limited experience so far. The session will aim to provide a foundation in the basics of the calibration pipeline and to walk attendees through examples of the reduction and calibration of JWST data. Our goal is that if you attend you will be better prepared afterwards to embark on analysis of data, whether from your own programmes or using the publicly available data from the first three years of observations …

12 December 2024: -Chris Evans, Macarena Garcia Marin- We would like to draw your attention to the ‘Webb Office Hours’ sessions that are organised virtually by STScI and held every two weeks. If you have any questions about JWST data, whether from your own programmes or archival data, these sessions are an excellent opportunity for you to directly interact with members of the JWST team at STScI. These are informal, online sessions where experts supporting JWST’s instruments are available for any questions you may have about JWST. These can include topics such as the data pipeline, data calibration, science instrument performance and proposal planning. The sessions are held every 2nd and 4th Thursday of the month at 11am Eastern Time US, and are not recorded. The questions and answers that are raised during the sessions are summarised (anonymously) in a written archive for future reference, so that other users may benefit from the …

12 December 2024: -Bethany Downer- April 2025 will mark fifteen years of the ESA/Hubble science outreach team publishing a new image every Monday from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The Picture of the Week series has become a flagship product for the ESA/Hubble programme throughout the years, now totalling nearly 800 individual images. The ESA/Hubble image archive also hosts more than 5300 images. The role of the ESA/Hubble science outreach team is to bring the images and science from the European community to a global audience, for which the Picture of the Week series has been a consistent driver. We want to continue the success of this programme moving forward, and we invite all scientists who have had (or will have) approved Hubble observing time to contact us if you feel you have aesthetically appealing yet visually informative image data that could be featured in this series. The success of the ESA/Hubble Picture …

12 December 2024: - Owen Higgins - 2024 was another busy year for the ESA/Hubble/Webb science outreach team. Webb has had another highly productive year of science operations, resulting in many new insights that we have been able to share with the public — too many to fully list here! Some of the highest-impact discoveries from Webb in the past year include a black hole and pristine gas in one of the most distant galaxies ever seen, evidence for the existence of a rocky planet atmosphere outside our Solar System, and candidates for the first young brown dwarfs outside the Milky Way galaxy. Across Webb’s science goals and beyond, we were able to highlight a plethora of discoveries, many from science teams in Europe. Webb examined planets near and far with new images of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere and storms, and a direct image of one of the coldest exoplanets observed to date. Webb …

12 December 2024: To celebrate another year of exciting images and discoveries from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, ESA/Hubble and ESA/Webb have released a new calendar for 2025 that showcases beautiful imagery from both missions. The 2025 calendar features a selection of images from Press Releases (from Hubble and Webb), Hubble Pictures of the Week and Webb Pictures of the Month published throughout 2024. These include imagery of planets, star clusters, galaxies, and more. It can now be accessed electronically for anyone to print, share and enjoy (please see the links provided below). The images featured in the calendar are as follows: Cover: Near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud lies the young star cluster NGC 602 where star formation is ongoing. This image highlights the cluster stars, the young stellar objects, and the surrounding gas and dust ridges, while also showing background galaxies and …

29 May 2024: - Chris Evans, Paule Sonnentrucker, Macarena Garcia Marin - The 2024 European Astronomical Society (EAS) Annual Meeting will be held on 1–5 July 2024 in Padova, Italy. The scientific programme for the week includes several Symposia and Special Sessions that are centred on the latest results from JWST. We are pleased to announce that ESA will be holding a drop-in session on the JWST data pipeline at 1:15pm on Tuesday 2 July. The objective for this lunch session is to provide an opportunity for you, the user, to be able to ask for help or advice regarding processing of JWST data with the Science Calibration Pipeline. The session will start with a brief summary of the status of the observatory and the data pipeline, and experts from the ESA JWST NIRSpec and MIRI teams will be available to answer your questions. There will also be further opportunities to follow-up with …

29 May 2024: - Francesco D’Eugenio (Cambridge), on behalf of the JADES Consortium - The JWST Advanced Early Extragalactic Survey (JADES) is a collaboration between the Guaranteed Time Observation teams of the NIRCam and NIRSpec instruments. The goal of JADES is to reveal the physical properties of galaxies in the young Universe, from when it was less than two billion years old up to the formation of the first galaxies right after the Cosmic ‘Dark Ages’. JADES makes optimal use of the synergies between NIRCam and NIRSpec to present a complete view of galaxies, combining their morphologies and total fluxes from the imaging, with detailed physical properties that can be measured from rest-frame UV, optical and near-IR spectra. The NIRSpec part of the programme uses the micro-shutter assembly (MSA), which enables observations of more than one hundred targets simultaneously. JADES has observed two tiers in depth: a deep tier, aimed at the faintest …

29 May 2024: - Chris Evans & Paule Sonnentrucker - The Science with the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes VII: Stars, Gas and Dust in the Universe conference was held in Porto, Portugal from 29 April to 2 May 2024. This was the latest in the series of ESA-sponsored conferences on the science from the missions, and was organised in collaboration with STScI and the Centre for Astrophysics of the University of Porto. After much anticipation of the complementary capabilities of Hubble and Webb, we are now in the remarkable period of having these two pioneering observatories in science operations at the same time. The rich scientific programme of the conference emphasised the unique scientific synergies between Hubble and Webb, and with other space and ground-based facilities. The programme featured 22 invited talks, 36 contributed talks, and 22 posters; the full list of talks is available from the conference page. The conference …

7 March 2024: - Chris Evans - The Science with the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes VII: Stars, Gas and Dust in the Universe conference will be held in Porto, Portugal from 29 April to 2 May 2024. This is the latest in our series of ESA-sponsored conferences that showcase the science from these two flagship missions. A particular motivation and focus for the conference is that we are in the remarkable position of having both Hubble and Webb in science operations at the same time. Their unique capabilities are now combining to give us spectacular new views of the Universe, which are complemented by multi-wavelength observations from a diverse range of ground and other space facilities. The objectives of the conference are to: highlight the latest Hubble and Webb results in studies of stars, gas and dust over all scales, with a focus on results with strong synergies between the two …

7 March 2024: - Chris Evans, María Arévalo Sánchez, Deborah Baines, Javier Espinosa Aranda, Mónica Fernández Barreiro, Marcos López-Caniego Alcarria, Bruno Merín Martin, Paule Sonnentrucker - The European Hubble Space Telescope (eHST) Science Archive is hosted at ESA’s European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC). Building on the long-standing partnership between NASA and ESA on Hubble, the eHST archive provides a European mirror for the public data in the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute. The eHST interface has been designed at the ESAC Science Data Centre (ESDC) for effective and intuitive exploration of this rich data archive, and includes accompanying catalogues and higher-level data products from MAST. To help maximise the science return from these data, a new visualisation tool for spectroscopy from the COS and STIS instruments has been included in the eHST archive. The new tool enables users to plot the spectra over custom ranges, …

15 December 2023: -Bethany Downer- To celebrate another year of exciting images and discoveries from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and the completion of the first year of science operations with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, ESA/Hubble and ESA/Webb have released a new calendar for 2024 that showcases beautiful imagery from both missions. The 2024 calendar features a selection of images from Press Releases (from Hubble and Webb), Hubble Pictures of the Week and Webb Pictures of the Month published throughout 2023. These include imagery of planets, star clusters, galaxies, and more. It can now be accessed electronically for anyone to print, share and enjoy (please see the links provided below). The images featured in the calendar are as follows: Cover: The subject of the first anniversary image from the James Webb Space Telescope is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. Jets bursting from young stars crisscross …