The James Webb Telescope Captures Planetary Images 385 Years Of Light From Earth

NASA's James Webb telescope has captured its first image on an exoplanet

JAKARTA - NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured its first image on an exoplanet located just 385 light-years from Earth. This image shows incredible details that the human eye has never seen before.

The James Webb telescope uses Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) which can block the light of the surrounding stars from taking epic images of the exoplanet HIP 65426.

The alien world was first discovered in 2017 by the South European Observatory Very Large Telescope, in Chile, but its wavelength was blocked by Earth's atmosphere.

However, as Webb floats in space, it is capable of taking direct shots at planets that astronomers can process to remove the star's light and reveal the planet.

Aaryn Carter, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who leads the image analysis, likes this to 'investigate a space treasure trove.'

This exoplanet is only 15 to 20 million years old, much younger than our 4.5 billion-year-old Earth.

NASA noted it was the planet was a giant gas giant that had no rocky surface and was therefore unable to accommodate life.

Astronomers discovered the planet in 2017 used the SPHERE instrument on the South European Observatory in Chile and took pictures using short infrared wavelengths of light.

Webb's technology was able to capture longer infrared wavelengths without interruption as the telescope soared high in space.

The researchers involved in the discovery are currently analyzing the data to write a paper to be submitted for review as information currently has not been reviewed by colleagues.

According to NASA, Webb's first arrest of an exoplanet has hinted at a possible future for studying a distant world.

Because HIP 65426 b is about 100 times further away from its parent star than Earth from the Sun, it is quite far from the star so Webb can easily separate planets from in-image stars.

This is because NIRCAM and MIRI are equipped with a coronagraph that functions as a small shield to block the light of the stars around them.

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch later this decade, will show even more sophisticated coronagraph.

In each filter image, the planet appears as a clump of light with slightly different shapes. That's because of the details of the Webb optical system and how to translate light through different optics.

While this isn't the first direct image of an exoplanet taken from space the Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of the exoplanet directly earlier HIP 65426 b is showing the way forward for the exploration of the exoplanet Webb.

"I think the most interesting thing is that we're just getting started," Carter said, as quoted by the Daily Mail. There are many more upcoming exoplanet images that will form our overall understanding of its physics, chemistry, and formation. We might even find planets that were previously unknown as well.