NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured the first direct image of a planet beyond our solar system

Astronomers have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to capture a direct image of a planet outside our solar system for the first time. The exoplanet known as ‘HIP 65426 b’ is a gas giant, which means it lacks a rocky surface and could not support life.

The exoplanet’s mass is estimated to be six to twelve times that of Jupiter, and these observations may help narrow that down even further. It is young, only 15 to 20 million years old, in comparison to our 4.5-billion-year-old planet.

“This is a watershed moment, not just for Webb, but for astronomy in general,” said Sasha Hinkley, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.

The image, as seen through four different light filters, demonstrates how Webb’s powerful infrared gaze can easily capture worlds beyond our solar system, pointing the way to future observations that will reveal more information about exoplanets than ever before, according to a statement from NASA.
This image depicts the exoplanet ‘HIP 65426 b’ in various infrared light bands.

A coronagraph, a set of masks within each instrument, blocks out the host star’s light so that the planet can be seen.

The planet was discovered in 2017 by astronomers using the SPHERE instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, and images of it were taken using short infrared wavelengths of light. At longer infrared wavelengths, Webb’s view reveals new details that ground-based telescopes would be unable to detect due to the intrinsic infrared glow of Earth’s atmosphere.
Because ‘HIP 65426 b’ is about 100 times farther away from its host star than Earth is from the Sun, Webb can easily separate the planet from the star in the image. “It was really impressive how well the Webb coronagraphs suppressed the host star’s light,” Hinkley said.

Because stars are much brighter than planets, taking direct images of exoplanets is difficult.

In the near-infrared, the planet ‘HIP 65426 b’ is more than 10,000 times fainter than its host star, and a few thousand times fainter in the mid-infrared. “It felt like I was digging for treasure in space,” said Aarynn Carter, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The James Webb Space Telescope produced the most detailed and sharp infrared image of the distant universe to date in July.