Limbach’s proposals are focused on white dwarfs, the remnant Earth-sized cores left behind after stars such as our sun swell into red giants and expel their outer layers. “We’re excited about the time we got,” she says. “Obviously we’re a bit disappointed.” Others, such as Mary Anne Limbach of Texas A&M University, were much more successful. “We had four proposals, and none of them got time,” Adams says. Some astronomers, such as Nathan Adams of the University of Manchester in England, put forward multiple proposals that were rejected.

That said, there were clear winners and losers. To minimize the chance of bias, the process of selecting JWST’s programs is completely anonymous, with hundreds of astronomers from multiple subfields involved in the decision process. But only 249 were selected-meaning that JWST has an “oversubscription” of nearly 7 to 1, similar to that for the Hubble Space Telescope. In total, astronomers submitted about 1,600 proposals to STScI for observing time on the NASA-led JWST. “There was an extraordinary response from the science community,” says Nancy Levenson, interim director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Maryland, which runs JWST. Competition was fierce, and while there were plenty of winners and some incredible science set to be conducted, there were many more who missed out on JWST’s “Cycle 2,” which starts next month. Last week on May 10 astronomers learned if their proposals for the telescope’s second year of science were successful. It has seen galaxies breathtakingly close to the dawn of time, probed the atmospheres of exoplanets in unprecedented detail and provided stunning new views of worlds in our solar system. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched in December 2021, has amazed astronomers since it began sending back its first science data in July 2022. Where do you point the world’s most powerful space telescope? It’s not an easy question.

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