James Webb Space Telescope Images a Planet Beyond Our Solar System
The James Webb Space Telescope (JSWT) recently captured its first-ever image of a planet outside our solar system.
On Thursday, NASA announced(Opens in a new window) the telescope had taken a direct image of an “exoplanet” called HIP 65426 b, which is orbiting another star about 350 light years away.
The planet isn’t a rocky world like Earth or Mars, but a gas giant that has about six to 12 times the mass of Jupiter. The James Webb Space Telescope was able to image the planet through various infrared light filters while blocking the light from its parent star.
Capturing images of exoplanets is difficult because stars shine much brighter than the planets that orbit them, making them harder to see. However, the space telescope captured the image, thanks in part to the exoplanet being relatively far from its parent sun.
“Since HIP 65426 b is about 100 times farther from its host star than Earth is from the Sun, it is sufficiently distant from the star that Webb can easily separate the planet from the star in the image,” NASA said.
Aarynn Carter, one of the astronomers on a team that processed the image, said(Opens in a new window) the JWST snapped the pictures on July 17 and July 30. “We performed this analysis using seven different filters, creating an infrared rainbow of images of this exoplanet!” he wrote in a tweet(Opens in a new window). “In each filter HIP 65426 b appears as a differently shaped 'blob' of light, due to the unique influences of JWST's optical systems.”
His team also published a paper(Opens in a new window) that says “these observations demonstrate that JWST is exceeding its nominal predicted performance by up to a factor of 10.”
It’s not the first time a telescope has captured images of exoplanets.
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