James Webb Space Telescope This Week: Earliest Quasar Pair, a Forbidden H3+ Signal and a Planet Found in Old Data

Three new James Webb Space Telescope results reached the news in the past week: the most distant compact pair of quasars yet found, the first detection of a long-predicted “forbidden” signal from the molecule H₃⁺, and a new image-processing method that pulled a known planet out of old Webb data. Each comes from a different team, and each has limits that the headlines leave out. Here is what the press releases and papers actually say.

The earliest quasar pair: J1602+4228AB

NSF NOIRLab announced a pair of quasars named J1602+4228AB, nicknamed Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua, in a release carried by EurekAlert. A quasar is a supermassive black hole actively feeding on gas. The pair is seen as it was about 900 million years after the Big Bang, which the release calls the most distant, and so oldest, compact quasar pair known and the third known quasar pair from cosmic dawn.

• Separation: about 18,100 light-years, roughly one-fifth the diameter of the Milky Way.
• Black holes: about 1.5 billion and 400 million times the mass of the Sun.
• How it was found: the companion was spotted during visual inspection of data from the JWST Aether survey, led by Emanuele Paolo Farina of NSF NOIRLab. Follow-up with the Gemini North telescope’s GNIRS spectrograph resolved the two quasars as separate objects, using data gathered in two nights of clear Maunakea sky.
• Redshift: about 6.08, according to Tech Times, which gives a light travel time of about 12.9 billion years.
• Publication: The Astrophysical Journal Letters, with lead author Silvia Onorato, on November 10.

Onorato said there is “no definitive theoretical explanation for how a single one of these giant quasars exists so early”. The release also notes that Gemini North’s GMOS was used to test whether gravitational lensing could explain the fainter quasar. The spectral differences favour a real physical pair, but the release says a lens model is needed to rule lensing out definitively.

A “forbidden” H₃⁺ signal, seen for the first time

A team led by David Neufeld of Johns Hopkins University reports, in a paper posted to arXiv on November 6 (arXiv:2611.10122), the first detection of the pure rotational spectrum of H₃⁺. That ion is central to interstellar chemistry, and its other signals have been seen before, but this rotational spectrum can occur only through “forbidden” transitions and had not been detected in a laboratory or in any astronomical source.

• Where: the main detection used JWST’s MIRI instrument toward the Herbig-Haro object HH 168 in Cepheus A West. The team found 26 lines above the 5-sigma level.
• HH 211: the abstract says archival MIRI data also show the signal in the HH 211 bow shock. HH 211 was not the first detection; it is a second object showing the same lines.
• What it means: the emission follows the hot shocked molecular hydrogen rather than the ionised gas, and the authors conclude the lines offer a new way to probe ionisation in shocked molecular gas.
• Caveats: a dissociative J-type shock model predicts H₃⁺ emission within a factor of about 1.5 of what was seen, while a C-type model underpredicts it by a factor of 5 to 6. The abstract says the excitation of H₃⁺ by energetic collisions is poorly constrained.

This is a preprint on arXiv, so it has not necessarily been through peer review yet.

FLIP: a digital twin of Webb finds a planet in old data

Northwestern University researchers published a method called FLIP, short for Physics-based Learning for Imaging Planets, in Nature on November 4, according to Northwestern Now. It builds a virtual replica of the telescope that simulates how starlight travels through the mirrors to the detectors, tunes the model to match real observations, and subtracts the simulated glare. Co-author Jason Wang said the team used the computational tools researchers use to train AI models “but we did not actually use AI”. Lead author Rodrigo Ferrer-Chavez is a PhD student in Wang’s group.

• Result: sensitivity to faint planets improved by 2 to 15 times over conventional processing.
• The planet: FLIP detected 51 Eridani b, a giant exoplanet already found with ground-based telescopes, in two-year-old JWST data where conventional processing could not distinguish it from glare.
• Limits: it was tested on re-analysed observations of three stars (HIP 65426, 51 Eridani and TYC 5899). The planet it recovered was already known, so this is a better way to see planets, not a new planet discovery. Northwestern’s article is inconsistent on how much fainter a planet is than its star, quoting “a million times” in one place and “100,000 times” in another.

Why these three matter

Together they show different uses of the same telescope: finding rare objects in the early universe, reading new chemistry in star-forming regions, and getting more from the data Webb has already collected. None of these results overturns existing cosmology. The quasar pair adds to an existing puzzle about how black holes grew so large so soon, and the other two are advances in method and measurement. We looked for a Webb team result supporting claims that the universe is far older than currently thought and did not include any, because none of the sources above make that claim.

Sources

• EurekAlert: Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua, the oldest compact quasar pair in the universe (NSF NOIRLab)
• Tech Times: Oldest known quasar pair found (November 10)
• Neufeld et al., arXiv:2611.10122: First detection of the forbidden rotational spectrum of H3+ (November 6)
• Northwestern Now: Hidden planet emerges from the glare (Nature, November 4)

We could not open the NOIRLab release on gemini.edu directly, so quasar details come from its EurekAlert copy. Image: James Webb Space Telescope primary mirror segments during cryogenic testing, NASA/MSFC/David Higginbotham/Emmett Given, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

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