The first-ever image of an exoplanet, or planet outside the solar system, has been captured by theJWST.
A paper posted to the preprint database arXiv shows the telescope's observations of the exoplanet. The paper was discussed in a post on NASA's website.
It's a gas giant that's six to eight times the size of Jupiter. The star is about twice the size of the sun and is located in the constellation Centaurus.
Aarynn Carter is a researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This is the first time we've ever imaged a planet that big.
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Scientists measure the light's wavelength in the spectrum by using mooches. The wavelength of visible light is shorter than that of the IR light. The range of the JWST can be up to 28 micrometers. The Hubble Space Telescope is only able to cover the red up to 2.5 microns. Astronomers have previously been able to see objects in a much broader way.
Carter said that they can cover the full Luminous wavelength range of these objects and get tight constraints on their luminosity and other properties. He said that it will be published in the future.
Each of the seven filters allowed a specific wavelength of light to be seen. The telescope was very precise.
Carter said that the telescope is more stable than they thought. Carter's work shows that JWST is capable of detecting smaller exoplanets than have been visualized before.
Carter said that they now have the ability to image objects similar to Neptune and Uranus.
It is difficult to see planets in a star's glare. The coronagraph on the Near-Infrared Camera is used to block the glare. In July of last year, scientists using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile were able to detect HIP 65426 b in the short wavelength of light.
"We picked this star as we knew it had a well-established planet that would be ripe for direct images and would therefore be an outstanding first target to test the JWST coronagraphs," said an associate professor in the Department of physics and astronomy at the University of Exeter. The early release science programs are designed to give scientists immediate access to early data from certain science observations.
Even though it is 100 times farther from its host star than Earth is from the sun, it is still over 10,000 times dimmer than its host star.
"This is a particularly exciting beginning to this new era capturing photons directly from exoplanet atmospheres at completely new wavelengths that should last for the next 20 years or so."
It was originally published on Live Science
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