The James Webb Space Telescope (JSWT) recently captured its first-ever image of a planet outside our solar system.
On Thursday, NASA announced 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 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. “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 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. In 2004, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile captured a faint image of another planet about five times larger than Jupiter orbiting a star 230 light years away.
The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope continues to capture images of exoplanets. In fact, it discovered HIP 65426 b in 2017. However, the James Webb Space Telescope promises to be far better at imaging worlds outside our solar system.
NASA noted: “Webb’s view, at longer infrared wavelengths, reveals new details that ground-based telescopes would not be able to detect because of the intrinsic infrared glow of Earth’s atmosphere.”
Carter added the JWST should also be able to detect lower mass exoplanets. “Before JWST, we were mostly limited to detections of super-Jupiters, but for the best targets we can now directly image exo-Uranus/Neptunes for the first time,” he tweeted.
In July, NASA also revealed the JWST had observed a planet called WASP-96b, a gas giant that resides about 1,150 light years away. But the space telescope didn't take a direct image of the planet. Instead, it captured a “spectrum" of WASP-96b, which can be used to deduce the atmospheric composition of a planet.