NASA James Webb Space Telescope has captured the first direct photographs of an exoplanet, an extraterrestrial planet outside of our solar system far away.
Webb has provided several pictures of the exoplanet HIP 65426 b, a gas giant around 385 light years away and six to twelve times as big as Jupiter.
NASA James Webb Space Telescope Finds New Exoplanet
NASA revealed the data on Thursday morning. The findings are part of an ongoing investigation. They have not yet undergone peer review or been published in a scientific publication.
"This is a transformative moment, not only for Webb but also for general astronomy, " Sasha Hinkley in a space agency's blog post.
NASA said Hinkley is an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom who led these observations with an extensive international collaboration.
The Very Large Telescope originally saw the exoplanet HIP 65426 b of the European Southern Observatory in Chile in 2017.
Ground-based telescopes cannot observe longer infrared wavelengths due to Earth's atmosphere.
Because Webb is stationed in space, he has access to a wider range of the infrared spectrum and can see more specifics of far-off planets.
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured photographs of other exoplanets, The Independent wrote. Still, it was challenging because the intense brightness of a planet's neighboring star may obscure the exoplanet's light.
This image shows the exoplanet HIP 65426 b in different bands of infrared light, as seen from the James Webb Space Telescope: purple shows the NIRCam instrument’s view at 3.00 micrometers, blue shows the NIRCam instrument’s view at 4.44 micrometers, yellow shows the MIRI instrument’s view at 11.4 micrometers, and red shows the MIRI instrument’s view at 15.5 micrometers. These images look different because of how the different Webb instruments capture light. A set of masks within each instrument, called a coronagraph, blocks out the host star’s light so that the planet can be seen. The small white star in each image marks the location of the host star HIP 65426, subtracted using the coronagraphs and image processing. The bar shapes in the NIRCam images are artifacts of the telescope’s optics, not objects in the scene.
Webb's images are not the first direct views of exoplanets. For instance, the HIP 65426 b is 10,000 times less brilliant than its star.
However, HIP 65426 b circles its star at a distance 100 times further than the Earth from the sun, making the planet easier for scientists to identify in Webb's photographs.
Coronagraphs are part of Webb's instrumentation.
This process usually darkens out a distant star's disk to lessen glare and make it simpler to identify and focus on an exoplanet.
JWST's Future Contributions
CNN pointed out that exoplanets were first directly photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Still, Webb's infrared investigation of exoplanets is only now getting started.
The telescope discovered the first unambiguous indication of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet's atmosphere and provided the first spectrum of an exoplanet by identifying a water signal in its atmosphere.
And only this summer did the space observatory start making scientific observations.
Carter said the researchers' overall knowledge of the physics, chemistry, and creation of exoplanets will be shaped by the many more photos of these worlds that are still to be discovered. They could even find worlds that weren't known to exist.
NASA added per Fox News that Webb's perspective makes advantage of longer infrared wavelengths, exposing new features that ground-based telescopes could not see due to the Earth's atmosphere's natural infrared light.
In order to get direct photos of exoplanets like HIP 65426 b, Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) were fitted with coronagraphs that masked out starlight, which is far brighter than planets.
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