The James Webb Space Telescope’s snapshots of a giant world orbiting another star show that the observatory is performing even better than expected and that its best exoplanet images are yet to come
The James Webb Space Telescope has taken its first direct images of a planet orbiting a distant star. The planet, known as HIP 65426 b, is a gas giant several times more massive than Jupiter, circling its star at a distance that is about three times greater than the separation between Neptune and our sun. HIP 65426 b is only around 15 million years old—a newborn in astronomical terms—and roughly 350 light-years from Earth.
Such a feat almost sounds impossible—like spotting a dimly glowing firefly fluttering under a bright stadium light from your seat across the field. And yet with the right technique, exoplanets can be revealed. “What we saw is that James Webb is so incredibly stable that the [starlight] pattern is therefore stable from star to star,” Hinkley says. “And this is really due to the incredible work that has been done by literally thousands of scientists and technicians and engineers over the last 20 years across the entire globe.”
So far astronomers have only managed to photograph exoplanets that are several times larger than Jupiter and orbiting very far from their stars. “But what we now know from these observations is that James Webb is probably going to get us down to analogues of our own Saturn or maybe our own Neptune for the closest stars,” Hinkley says.
The latest exoplanet images also bode well for Elisabeth Matthews, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva. “For my own program, it’s validating to see that the instrument really will work as well as we expected when we designed the program,” Matthews says.
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