One of the main uses of the James Webb Space Telescope is to study the atmospheres of exoplanets to search for the building blocks of life elsewhere in the universe.
Recently, and for the first time, astronomers captured a direct image of a planet outside our solar system using Webb’s various instruments.
According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the exoplanet, called HIP 65426 b, is located about 350 light-years from Earth. In addition, it is a gas giant, that is, it does not have a rocky surface and could not be habitable.
With a mass between six and twelve times that of Jupiter, HIP 65426 b is between 15 and 20 million years old, making it a baby planet compared to Earth, which is 4.5 billion years old.
Although this is not the first image of its kind, as the Hubble telescope has already imaged exoplanets, it is considered a milestone because it reveals the amazing potential of the Webb to explore such worlds.
The image, viewed through four different light filters, shows 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 than ever about exoplanets and planets. the universe.
Astronomers discovered the planet in 2017, using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and its SPHERE instrument, located in Chile, managing to capture images using short-infrared wavelengths of light.
However, Webb’s view, at longer infrared wavelengths, reveals new details that ground-based telescopes could not detect due to the inherent infrared glow of Earth’s atmosphere.
Aarynn Carter, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the analysis of the images, concludes:
I think the most exciting thing is that we’ve only just begun. There are many more images of exoplanets to come that will shape our general understanding of their physics, chemistry, and formation. We might even discover previously unknown planets.
Source: Okchicas
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