Space-based telescope releases first photos of planet outside solar system

The scientific team behind the James Webb Space Telescope has released its first directly taken images of an exoplanet Read Full Article at RT.com

Space-based telescope releases first photos of planet outside solar system

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured images of a massive Jupiter-like body 363 light years away

The James Webb Space Telescope has taken its first images of a planet outside our solar system. The young “super Jupiter” orbits its sun at a distance almost 100 times greater than that between Earth and the Sun.

NASA released images of the planet viewed through different filters in a blog post on Thursday. Scientific details of the observation were pre-printed in August and have yet to be peer reviewed.

The planet in question, dubbed HIP 65426 b, was first discovered by the Spectro-Polarimetric High-Contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) in 2017, so the James Webb team knew exactly where to find it.

It is a gas giant that has a mass estimated to be between six and 12 times larger than Jupiter and is relatively young, dating back some 15 or 20 million years.

The planet travels around a star about 363 light years away from us. Its orbit is around 92 AU – a unit equal to the distance between Earth and the Sun – taking around 600 Earth years to complete a rotation.

That orbit distance is what helped the space observatory to take clear images of the exoplanet. Its optical sensors have special tools called coronagraphs, which can block radiation from a star and allow imaging of less bright objects nearby. The further a planet is from the star, the better its light can be eliminated.

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The James Webb telescope photographed HIP 65426 b in several wavelengths that a ground-based observatory simply could not have picked due to Earth’s atmosphere. The SPHERE program captured images of it using short infrared light.