For the first time, NASA’s powerful James Webb Telescope has taken direct images of an exoplanet, HIP 65426B, outside our solar system. The planet, which has a mass of about six to 12 times the mass of Jupiter, is a gas giant, meaning it has no rocky surface and could not be habitable. According to NASA, they are a young planet, as they are about 15 to 20 million years old, compared to our Earth which is about 4.5 billion years old. An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet outside our solar system that usually orbits another star in our galaxy. Most of the exoplanets discovered so far are in the relatively small region of the Milky Way galaxy. “Small” refers to a region thousands of light years from our solar system. It was discovered by astronomers in 2017 using the SPHERE instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, which took images using the short infrared wavelength of light, while the James Webb telescope used longer wavelengths that help reveal terrestrial details. -Based telescopes cannot. Sasha Hinckley, associate professor of physics at the University of Exeter in the UK said: “This is a transformative moment, not just for Webb but for astronomy in general.” Taking direct images of exoplanets is challenging, as their host stars are much brighter than the planets. HIP 65426 B is about 100 times farther from its host star compared to Earth’s distance from the Sun, making it far enough that Webb could easily separate the planet from the star in the images. The exoplanet discovered by James Webb is more than 10,000 times fainter than its host star in the near-infrared and about a few thousand times fainter in the mid-infrared, but its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) Webb are equipped with conographs, which act as tiny masks that block, suppress light from the host star, helping the giant, powerful telescope to take immediate images. “Getting this image was like hunting for space treasure,” said Aarynn Carter, a researcher who led the analysis of the images. The researchers analyzed the images and data, and the journal will be peer-reviewed, but NASA believes the first capture of a distant world already suggests potential for studying distant planets.
