The James Webb Space Telescope has captured the first direct image of a distant exoplanet, a world beyond our Solar System.
Webb returned several photographs of the exoplanet HIP 65426 b, a gas giant between six and twelve times the mass of Jupiter located about 385 light-years from Earth, using a series of instruments.
The findings are part of ongoing research and have not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal, but NASA announced them in a blog post Thursday morning.
“This is a pivotal moment, not just for Webb, but for astronomy in general,” said Sasha Hinkley, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Exeter. She is the chief scientist of an international team studying exoplanets.
HIP 65426 b was discovered in 2017 by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, which observed the exoplanet in short wavelengths of infrared light because Earth’s atmosphere blocks longer wavelengths for ground-based observatories. Because Webb is in space, he has access to more infrared spectrum and can see more detail on distant planets.
Webb’s images are not the first direct images of exoplanets; The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of other extraterrestrial worlds, but it is difficult to do so because the strong brightness of a planet’s neighboring star can obscure the light from that exoplanet. HIP 65426 b, for example, is 10,000 times fainter than its star.
HIP 65426 b, on the other hand, orbits its star at a distance 100 times greater than Earth’s distance from the Sun, which helped astronomers identify the planet in Webb’s photographs. Webb’s sensors also have coronagraphs, which obscure the distant star’s disk to reduce brightness and make it easier to detect and focus on an exoplanet.
“It was really impressive how well Webb’s coronagraphs worked in suppressing the light from the host star,” said Dr. Hinkley.
The photographs, captured with different filters and with Webb’s near-infrared camera (Nircam) and mid-infrared instrument (Miri), are just the beginning of what scientists predict will be a long series of exoplanet observations and discoveries made possible by new space. observatory. . The photographs follow a new analysis of one of Webb’s first sightings, a spectrum of light from the exoplanet Wasp 39b, which confirmed for the first time the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of an extraterrestrial world.
“I think what’s most exciting is that we’ve only just begun,” UC Santa Cruz postdoctoral researcher Aarynn Carter, who analyzed Webb’s new images of HIP 65426 b, said in a statement. “There are many more images of exoplanets that will shape our overall understanding of their physics, chemistry and formation. “We may even discover previously unknown planets.”
