![]() The planet was captured then in much shorter infrared wavelengths of light as compared to the images taken by Webb. In fact, it was the instrument’s first ever catch. “… but with careful image processing I was able to remove that light and uncover the planet,” he said, as quoted in the NASA blog.Ĭarter is the first author of the preprint, available online, presenting the observations and analyses made around HIP 65426 b using Webb.Īstronomers discovered the planet HIP 65426 b in 2017 using the SPHERE instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. Still, starlight was all that Aarynn Carter, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, would see at first. The planet is also more than 10,000 times fainter than its host star in the near-infrared, and vastly more so in the mid-infrared. (The Sun-Earth distance is about 150 million kilometres or 1 Astronomical Unit.) Otherwise, host stars are so much brighter than their planets that a direct image of the planet becomes a big ask. It helps, for direct imaging, that the exoplanet is 100 times farther from its host star than Earth is from the Sun. The small white star in the four images represents the host star. A set of masks within each instrument, called a coronagraph, blocks out the host star’s light so that the planet can be seen,” the NASA blog sharing the image explains. “These images look different because of the ways the different Webb instruments capture light. The United States’ space agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), has shared the image of the exoplanet in four different bands of light: Both are equipped with coronagraphs, which help to block out starlight so that the exoplanet is captured directly. MIRI covers the wavelength range of 5 to 28 µm. NIRCam is Webb's primary imager that covers the infrared wavelength range 0.6 to 5 µm. The star-planet system was captured using Webb’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) from 2 to 5 µm and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) from 11 to 16 µm. Aged about 15 to 20 million years old, it’s like a child in comparison to Earth, which is more like a grandpa at 4.5 billion years old. Unlike Earth, it has no rocky surface and is uninhabitable. The planet is about six to 12 times the mass of Jupiter. HIP 65426 b goes around its parent star, HIP 65426 (a glimpse into the naming convention), which is close to 400 light years away. For reference, the gas giants in our solar system are Jupiter and Saturn. It is a gas giant, meaning that it’s a large planet mostly composed of helium and/or hydrogen. The name of the exoplanet is HIP 65426 b. Webb’s capture of the super-Jupiter mass exoplanet tells us where we could be headed in our journey to study distant worlds. However, this is Webb’s first (with a promise of many, many more) and the first ever direct detection of an exoplanet beyond 5 micrometres (µm). This is not the first direct image ever of an exoplanet - the Hubble Space Telescope has done it previously. The latest in the James Webb space telescope’s revelations is the direct image of a planet outside our solar system, called an exoplanet.
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