Some stars have planets. Others are orbited by brown dwarfs, balls of gas too massive to be planets, but too low-mass to be stars. Astronomers love these brown dwarf-star pairs because being paired with a star helps reveal a brown dwarf’s age. Ages of astronomical objects are often hard to measure, but essential for understanding how they form.
Now, you can join NASA’s new Backyard Worlds: Binaries project and help astronomers discover these rare and interesting pairs. As a volunteer, you’ll inspect images from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope. Brown dwarfs may appear as small dots moving across a field of otherwise static stars.
“We need your help to gain critical insights into these enigmatic cosmic objects,” said project lead Aaron Meisner.
Brown dwarfs are common but mysterious because they are so faint. There’s one for every three or four stars in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy. They are important laboratories for understanding giant planets like Jupiter.
Join the Backyard Worlds: Binaries project today and help astronomers understand where and when brown dwarfs form! You can also try one of our other brown dwarf-related projects: Backyard Worlds: Cool Neighbors! Anyone with a laptop or cell phone can participate. Participation does not require citizenship in any particular country.
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features the galaxy cluster MACS0329-0211.
NASA, ESA, M. Postman (STScI); Image Processing: G. Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
Looking somewhat like a swarm of bees returning to their hive, this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image released on June 12, 2026, features the galaxy cluster MACS0329-0211. Galaxy clusters like MACS0329-0211 are important signposts in the story of how the structure of the universe evolved, and are the ultimate telescopic lenses, placing gravitationally lensed galaxies from the earliest stages of the universe into our view.
Zoom into this galaxy swarm and you will find large, oval-shaped elliptical galaxies, and thin spiral and lenticular galaxies viewed from the edge. We can also see the full, face-on view of spiral galaxies and their curving spiral arms. The image’s upper-right quadrant holds faint arcs of distant galaxies gravitationally lensed by the cluster’s massive gravity. The largest of these arcs appears above the bright oval shape of a giant elliptical galaxy. Closer inspection of the image’s center reveals several bright-white intersecting curves that appear as a distorted figure eight. This may be another distant galaxy whose light was magnified and distorted by this massive cluster’s gravity.
Hubble looked at MACS0329-0211 as part of an observing program of X-ray bright galaxy clusters. Researchers used Hubble’s two main cameras, the Advanced Camera for Surveys and its Wide Field Camera 3, to gather data visible and infrared light from the cluster. Hubble’s ability to see such a broad spectrum of light makes it a valuable tool in understanding the very nature of these galaxy clusters.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, M. Postman (STScI); Image Processing: G. Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
The reservoir appears lake-like and expansive in an image acquired in June 2023.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
The reservoir is nearly empty by May 2026. The Gila River’s natural channel is now visible and flanked with green vegetation in what had been the bottom of the reservoir.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
The reservoir appears lake-like and expansive in an image acquired in June 2023.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
The reservoir is nearly empty by May 2026. The Gila River’s natural channel is now visible and flanked with green vegetation in what had been the bottom of the reservoir.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
June 7, 2023
May 22, 2026
Little water remains in the San Carlos Reservoir in May 2026 (right) compared to fuller conditions in June 2023 (left). Images were captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the Landsat 9 and 8 satellites, respectively. NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison.
The Gila River is among the Southwest’s most important rivers, delivering water for people, farms, and wildlife while linking the snow-fed mountains of southwestern New Mexico to the desert lowlands of southwestern Arizona.
In wetter years, seasonal snowfall on the Mogollon Mountains and Black Range provides much of the river’s spring flow and helps refill San Carlos Reservoir, which is formed by the Coolidge Dam. When filled to capacity, the reservoir is one of Arizona’s largest bodies of water.
However, in 2026, lackluster snowfall left the mountain snowpack in the Gila River watershed at 2 percent of the 1991-2020 March median. The limited snowpack pushed April streamflow to 39 percent of normal. By June, after mandatory water releases for downstream agriculture, the reservoir held less than 400 acre-feet of water.
The Landsat image above (right) shows the near-empty reservoir on May 22, 2026, when it stored 389 acre-feet of water—less than 1 percent full; the other image (left) shows the same area in June 2023, when it was about 60 percent full. The green vegetation growing along the river channel and reservoir edge includes a mixture of tamarisk, willow, cottonwood, sedges, and grasses.
Officials closed the reservoir indefinitely on June 5, 2026, after the declining water levels contributed to low oxygen levels—hypoxia—that killed virtually all of its fish. Species living in the reservoir included largemouth bass, black crappie, bluegill, channel catfish, flathead catfish, and several stocked species, including brown trout and rainbow trout. The decomposing fish may pose health risks to people attempting to boat or fish, the San Carlos Recreation and Wildlife Department warned.
The reservoir has hit similarly low water levels in the past, running out of water at least 20 times since it was filled in 1930, according to news reports. Even when the dam and reservoir were first dedicated, there was enough grass growing on the dried reservoir bottom that humorist Will Rogers famously quipped to President Calvin Coolidge: “If that was my lake, I’d mow it.”
Other years with major fish kills include 1976 and 2018. After more than 5 million fish died during a similar event in 1976, the Gila Heraldreported that it took five years for the lake’s ecosystem to rebound.
The region is currently in the midst of a multi-year dry period that has left much of the Gila River’s headwaters in New Mexico in a state of severe drought, according to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor.
However, the river’s flow is highly variable, and heavy rains during the coming wet season could help the reservoir recover. A seasonal monsoon outlook released by NOAA in May 2026 projected a 33 to 50 percent chance that an above-average amount of rain would fall in the region that summer. El Niño in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, which was strengthening in late spring 2026, can make heavy rains in the U.S. Southwest more likely.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.Story by Adam Voiland.
This artist’s concept shows exoplanet HD 80606 b being “roasted” as its orbit approaches periastron, the point at which it is closest to its host star, which is similar to our Sun.
Credits: Artwork: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)
4 min read
NASA’s Webb Catches Exoplanet Getting Roasted
One well-done gas giant, coming right up! That’s the latest from researchers analyzing NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s observations of HD 80606 b, an exoplanet four times the mass of Jupiter with an extremely elliptical orbit that sweeps close by its Sun-like star. The research team is presenting their study and preliminary findings Tuesday at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California.
“Hot Jupiters are already considered some of the most extreme exoplanets we know of, but even among that population, HD 80606 b is one of the most extreme,” said Tiffany Kataria, the study’s principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “We typically think of hot Jupiters as hot gas giants sitting right next to their stars, but this planet’s highly eccentric orbit creates a completely different beast.”
As the planet plunges close to its star, Webb shows its temperature skyrockets by 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit. Previous studies have shown that radical temperature swings can cause an exoplanet’s chemistry and clouds to change in real time. According to the research team, the dynamic conditions of HD 80606 b make the planet an ideal target to observe these changes with Webb’s powerful instruments.
Image: Artist’s concept exoplanet HD 80606 b
This artist’s concept shows exoplanet HD 80606 b being “roasted” as its orbit approaches periastron, the point at which it is closest to its host star, which is similar to our Sun.
Artwork: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)
“Observing a planet like HD 80606 b is actually very efficient because its unusual orbit, with the corresponding swings in temperature and chemical composition, allow us to gather data under varying conditions in just hours and apply those findings to other hot Jupiters or more conventional exoplanets,” said Laura C. Mayorga, co-investigator on the study and an exoplanet astronomer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
Measurements of temperature and chemical composition were done with spectroscopy, a technique scientists use to break light into its component colors to reveal information about the composition, temperature, motion, and physical properties of objects in space. The team used Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) for an extended observation of HD 80606 b before, during, and after its periastron, or closest pass by its star. During periastron, the planet also passed behind the star from Webb’s perspective in what’s known as a secondary eclipse. The observation was years in the planning, as scheduling the time to catch the planet at this point was complex given its extremely elliptical 111-day orbit, and Webb’s own restrictions on where it can look during specific times of the year, based on Earth’s position in orbit around the Sun.
Researchers say they have only begun to peel back the layers of an incredibly rich dataset, but they can clearly see a dramatic shift in the exoplanet’s temperature. “Webb has shown that the planet’s increase in temperature was even more extreme than we anticipated based on Spitzer data,” said Kataria.
In fact, the planet had already been dubbed the “roasted exoplanet” and even got its own poster in NASA’s popular series. NASA’s now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope laid the groundwork of infrared observations of HD 80606 b, showing that more detailed spectroscopic data from Webb would be especially compelling.
“Spitzer did amazing work on this exoplanet, and now Webb is building on that legacy by enabling us to drill down to distinguish specific chemical signatures like methane and carbon dioxide, which is just amazing progress,” said Ryan Challener, co-author and research associate at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science. “There’s so much to learn from this one dataset here — we really are just getting started deciphering what Webb has to tell us.”
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
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HD 80606 b (Artist’s Concept)
This artist’s concept shows exoplanet HD 80606 b being “roasted” as its orbit approaches periastron, the point at which it is closest to its host star, which is similar to our Sun.
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