James Webb takes a powerful photo of an exoplanet

NASA has released the first image of an exoplanet taken by the James Webb Telescope. James Webb is a NASA telescope launched as a successor to the old and tired Hubble Space Telescope.

James Webb is much more powerful than Hubble in terms of equipment, because it is more modern. In addition, it is positioned better than Hubble’s, which is much closer to Earth. The new telescope is located at one of the Lagrangian points between the Sun and Earth – a stable gravitational point between the two points.

While Hubble is located in an orbit about 500 km from Earth, James Webb is located 1.5 million km – 4 times farther from the Earth than the Moon. This is, for several reasons, a more useful site than the Hubble Space Telescope.

One of the missions of the James Webb Space Telescope is to explore possible exoplanets and exoplanets with life in the universe.

Watch the first image of an exoplanet taken by James Webb

The image released on September 1 by astronomers consists of the exoplanet HIP 65426 b – an exoplanet 400 light-years from Earth. The planet is rather “heavy” – its mass is between six and twelve times that of Jupiter. It is a very young planet, its age ranges from 15 to 20 million years.

For comparison, the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. With an orbit of about 630 Earth days, the planet is 100 times farther from its star than Earth is from the sun.

Researchers have published a paper describing the first image of an exoplanet captured by James Webb in the repository arXiv. The article has not been peer reviewed.

“This is a transformative moment, not just for Webb, but for astronomy in general,” he said in a statement. report NASA Sasha Hinckley from the University of Exeter, UK.

HIP 65426 b was discovered in 2017 by astronomers at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (European Southern Observatory), located in Chile. They used a device called spherean adaptive optics tool specifically focused on the study of exoplanets.

Big challenges

That James Webb’s first image of an exoplanet isn’t the only interesting point in the story. There is more.

At the time, in 2017, SPHERE couldn’t provide such high resolution, and not so much detail. The tool is allocated to the floor. Therefore, the atmosphere causes certain distortions in the images. Because James Webb is in space, well positioned, he can see the planet in a wider range of the infrared spectrum than VLT equipment, as well as other light spectra.

In addition, James Webb has a coronary vertebra, which is a filter that blocks starlight. In this way, the orbiting star HIP 65426 b does not cause such distortion in the observation. In the infrared spectrum, the planet is about 10,000 times darker than the star – the brightness of the planets comes from the reflection of the brightness of the stars.

“It was really impressive how well the coronal web clips suppressed the light from the host star,” she says Hinckley.

The how many magazinesHinckley described the planet as “a firefly around a spotlight”.

“Getting this image was like searching for a treasure in space,” said Aryn Carter, a researcher at the University of California. The researcher led the study that analyzed James Webb’s photographs. “Initially all I could see was starlight, but through careful image processing I was able to remove that light and discover the planet.”

“I think the most exciting thing is that we’re just getting started,” Carter says. “There are many images of exoplanets coming that will shape our general understanding of physics, chemistry and morphology. We may also discover previously unknown planets.”