NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has taken direct images of a planet outside our solar system, the first time it has accomplished such a feat. This is a very important event because exoplanets don’t emit much light, so researchers usually discover new planets using indirect methods, such as tracking shadows as they pass through their host star.
Webb, however, didn’t have to do all that. He directly captured an image of a planet called TWA 7 b. Scientists believe that the planet has a mass of about Saturn and is located at a distance of 100 light years from Earth.
The planet is much further away from its star than the Earth, so it has a longer orbital period of several hundred years. The age of the planetary system is believed to be about 6 million years, so we see the early stages of its development. Our Sun is considered to be middle-aged, with an age of about 4.6 billion years.
TWA 7 b is ten times smaller than any previous exoplanet that could be directly observed with a telescope, according to The Guardian. Typically, planets of this size cannot be seen with telescopes because the light from the host star masks direct observation.
The research team, led by Dr. Anne-Marie Lagrange, got around this problem by making a telescope attachment that mimicked the results of a solar eclipse. This reduced much of the light coming from the star to make it easier to observe surrounding objects.
This process allowed the team to spot the planet, which appears as a bright light source with a narrow ring of debris. Lagrange and her team note that there is still a “very small probability” that the images show a background galaxy, but the evidence “strongly suggests” that the light source is a previously undiscovered planet.
The first exoplanet was first discovered in 1992. Since then, nearly 6,000 more exoplanets have been discovered. Again, the vast majority of these have not been captured by direct imaging.
This is just the latest stunning discovery by our good friend James Webb. He recently captured a cosmic phenomenon called an “Einstein ring” where light from one galaxy bends around the mass of another. Last year, the telescope found the most distant galaxy ever observed.
