PHOTO | Historic moment: James Webb took the first photo of a planet outside our solar system
For the first time, astronomers used the space telescope James Webb on NASA to capture a direct image of a planet beyond ours The solar system.
It is an exoplanet that is a gas giant, which means it has no solid rocky surface and cannot be inhabited.
The photograph, through four different light filters, shows how Webb's powerful infrared beam can easily pick up worlds outside our solar system, showing that future observations will reveal more information about exoplanets than ever before.
Our Early Release Science Team for Direct Observations of Exoplanets is thrilled to announce the first direct detection of an exoplanet with JWST. See below for an early image release and a thread on how this all happened! 🧵…https://t.co/B9brWHczZu pic.twitter.com/BjRDwMDIfJ
— Aarynn Carter (@AarynnCarter) September 1, 2022
"This moment is a turning point, not only for 'James Webb', but also for astronomy in general," he said Sasha Hinckley, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at The University Exeter in Britain, who led the observations with extensive international cooperation. "Web" is an international mission led by NASA in cooperation with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and KSA (Canadian Space Agency).
The exoplanet in Webb's photo, called HIP 65426 b, has about six to 12 times the mass of Jupiter. It is young for a planet, between 15 and 20 million years old, which is very little compared to The earth which is 4,5 billion years old.
Discovered in 2017, the exoplanet in this system, HIP 65426 b, is seven times as massive as Jupiter but roughly three times further away from its star than Neptune is to our Sun!
Artist Rendering: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / S. Wiessinger pic.twitter.com/9rBAefVYl8
— Aarynn Carter (@AarynnCarter) September 1, 2022
Astronomers discovered the planet in 2017 using the instrument Sphere of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile and recorded it using short infrared rays. The Web's view, at longer infrared wavelengths, reveals new details that ground-based telescopes would not be able to detect due to the intrinsic infrared glow of Earth's atmosphere.
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