NASA has quietly committed to the most ambitious astronomy mission ever attempted: a six-metre space telescope that will image Earth-like planets directly and sniff their atmospheres for signs of life. It will not launch for fifteen years. The hard part has already begun.
From a possible biosignature in K2-18b's air to a galaxy that should not exist 290 million years after the Big Bang, JWST has spent the past year breaking models faster than theorists can patch them. Here is what it actually found.