The James Webb Space Telescope of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was used for the first time by astronomers to take pictures of a planet outside the solar system. Message regarding it published on the official website of the aerospace department.
Image Source: NASA / ESA / CSA / A Carter (UCSC) / ERS 1386 team / A. Pagan (STScI).
“For the first time, astronomers have used NASA’s James Webb Telescope to take a direct image of a planet outside our solar system. The exoplanet is a gas giant, that is, it does not have a rocky surface and cannot be habitable.NASA said in a statement.
The space observatory captured the exoplanet HIP 65426 b, whose mass is 6-12 times that of Jupiter. According to scientists, this planet is much younger than Earth. If our planet is regarding 4.5 billion years old, then HIP 65426 b exists only 15-20 million years. The planet was first discovered using the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument (SPHERE) of the European Southern Observatory in Chile.
Exoplanet HIP 65426 b is regarding 100 times farther from its parent star than Earth is from the Sun. It is noted that obtaining direct images of the planets is not an easy task, since they are much less bright than the stars. HIP 65426 b is more than 10,000 times dimmer than its parent star in the near infrared and several thousand times dimmer in the mid-infrared. When using each of the four filters, it was possible to obtain an image in which the exoplanet looks like a clot of light, the shape of which changes.
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