From Pune, the discovery of Alaknanda, Milky Way’s long

In the study of the cosmos, exceptions play a curious role. They start as challenges to established science, disruptions to theories astronomers worked years to arrive at. They push the frontiers of science, finding patterns behind the non-sequitur, often uncovering a hidden facet of the universe. For example, until 1998, scientists believed that cosmic expansion would slow down. But, in a challenge to gravity, they found out it was speeding up. The unknown force driving this abnormal behaviour was named dark energy, a widely studied phenomenon today. Even Earth, as NASA notes, is “a tiny, fragile exception in the cosmos”.

Since its launch in 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has unearthed many such exceptions, the most notable of which led scientists to the discovery that the u