When the James Webb Space Telescope sent its first images back to Earth in July last year, researchers gathered excitedly to pore over them. JWST, a NASA-led collaboration between the US, Canada, and Europe, is the most powerful space telescope in history and can view objects 100 times fainter than the Hubble Space Telescope. Those images contained the first clear evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside the solar system.

Almost immediately after it started full operations, incredible vistas from across the universe poured down, from images of remote galaxies at the dawn of time to amazing landscapes of nebulae, the dust-filled birthplaces of stars.

Months later, JWST continues to send down reams of data to astonished astronomers on Earth, and it is expected to transform our understanding of the distant universe, exoplanets, planet formation, galactic structure, and much more. Read the full story.

—Jonathan O’Callaghan

The James Webb Space Telescope is one of MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2023. Explore the rest of the list, and vote in our poll to help us decide our final 11th technology.

What Mexico’s planned geoengineering restrictions mean for the future of the field

What’s happened: Last month, a US startup called Make Sunsets claimed it had conducted a solar geoengineering experiment in Baja California, Mexico, launching a pair of weather balloons laden with a few grams of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Now, the Mexican government plans to ban related experiments.