James Webb Discovers First-Ever Exoplanet by Taking a Picture of It
Scientists harnessing NASA's James Webb Space Telescope took what appears to be the first-ever direct picture of an exoplanet resulting in its discovery, in yet another accomplishment for the mighty space observatory.
An international team of astronomers published a paper on the historic finding in the prestigious journal Nature.
"If confirmed, this would represent Webb's first direct image discovery of a planet," they wrote of the finding, "and the lightest planet ever seen with this technique outside the solar system."
The planet, dubbed TWA 7 b, orbits a young star and appears to be about the size of Neptune. Though the James Webb has directly imaged other exoplanets previously, they were previously known to exist; in this case, in an apparent first-ever accomplishment, the act of capturing the picture also established the existence of the distant world.
Since its launch in 2021, the James Webb has been at the forefront of many exciting space discoveries, from plumbing the depths of the early universe to investigating how our solar system was formed. It's able to do all this because it's the largest space telescope ever built, even bigger than Hubble Space Telescope, with a primary mirror measuring over 21 feet in diameter.
TWA 7 b was difficult to detect due to the glare of the orbiting star, so the team developed a clever mechanism that mimics an eclipse in order to pick out any bodies that are lurking in the blinding light.
The exoplanet orbits the star TWA 7, a relatively young red dwarf at 6.4 million years of age that sports a sizable debris field.
"Here we're looking at a system that is about 6 [million] years old, so we are really witnessing the youth of the planetary system," Anne-Marie Lagrange, astrophysicist and first author of the paper, told The Guardian.
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