To prove it has the potential to revolutionize the search for exoplanets (as exoplanets are called), the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured the first direct image of a world orbiting a distant star.
Most of the so-called alien planets discovered so far have been discovered using transit monitoring technology, which analyzes temporary changes in the brightness of stars.
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Only about thirty of them have been recorded – and there are more than 5,000 confirmed – with live images. That’s because exoplanets are extremely difficult to observe directly because they are darker than the stars that orbit them.
However, everything indicates that this is about to change, as less than two months after the start of his scientific operations, Webb provided the first direct image of an exoplanet.
It is a gas giant orbiting the star HIP 65426, which is about 385 light-years from Earth, and was discovered in 2017 by observations of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. It appears in the JWST image as a small spot near the brightness of the star.
The telescope imaged an exoplanet using the near-infrared camera (NIRCam) and the middle infrared (MIRI) instrument. All of them focus on a different quality of infrared light.
“This is a transformative moment, not just for Webb, but for astronomy in general,” said Sasha Hinckley, an astronomer at the University of Exeter in the UK who led the observations.
The James Webb Telescope will not discover new planets
The James Webb Telescope has not been adapted to discover new exoplanets. Instead, his role will be to give scientists more information about worlds previously identified by other observatories.
Direct observation of the exoplanet HIP 65426 b was only possible thanks to a combination of two factors. First, because it is so far from its parent star, a distance of 100 times the distance from the Sun to Earth (for comparison, Pluto orbits only 40 times that distance). Second, HIP 65426 b is also extremely massive, 12 times the size of Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System.
However, it is about 10,000 times lighter than its host star in the near infrared, and a few thousand times lighter in the mid-infrared portion of the spectrum. However, due to his sensitivity, Webb was able to separate the two bodies.
“Getting this image was like a treasure hunt in space,” said University of California astronomer Erin Carter, who led the analysis of the images. “At first, all I could see was starlight, but through careful image processing, I was able to remove that light and discover the planet.”
As highlighted by the site space.comBoth NIRCam and MIRI are equipped with devices called coronagraphs, which block light from the central star. “It was really impressive how the Webb books suppressed the light from the host star,” Hinckley said.
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By observing the star through four different filters, the scientists were able to obtain images that reveal the planet as a tiny bubble of light. “The shape of the bubble varies in each image, a byproduct of the telescope’s optics,” the scientists said in a statement.
With an estimated age of between 15 and 20 million years, HIP 65426 b can be considered a very young planet (compared, for example, to 4.5 billion years on Earth). Because of its invasive nature, it certainly does not have the ability to support life.
There are still many intriguing questions astronomers want to understand about this world and many others that Webb still has to figure out, including the details of its chemical composition and how it formed.
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