NASA issued a blog post on Thursday morning announcing the findings, which are a part of an ongoing inquiry and have not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific publication.
“This is a pivotal moment, not only for Webb but also for astronomy in general,” said Sasha Hinkley, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Exeter. She is the principal scientist in an international team studying exoplanets.
The Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory in Chile made the infrared light observations of HIP 65426 b in 2017, as longer wavelengths are obstructed by the Earth's atmosphere for ground-based observatories. Webb can view more of the infrared spectrum because he is in space, which allows him to see more features on far-off worlds.
The Hubble Space Telescope has also taken pictures of other extraterrestrial worlds, but it was challenging to do so because the brightness of a planet's neighboring star can block out the light from that exoplanet. Webb's images are not the first direct images of exoplanets. As an illustration, HIP 65426 b is 10,000 times fainter than its star.
This image shows the exoplanet HIP 65426 b in different bands of infrared light, as seen from the James Webb Space Telescope: purple shows the NIRCam instrument’s view at 3.00 micrometers, blue shows the NIRCam instrument’s view at 4.44 micrometers, yellow shows the MIRI instrument’s view at 11.4 micrometers, and red shows the MIRI instrument’s view at 15.5 micrometers. These images look different because of the ways the different Webb instruments capture light. A set of masks within each instrument, called a coronagraph, blocks out the host star’s light so that the planet can be seen. The small white star in each image marks the location of the host star HIP 65426, which has been subtracted using the coronagraphs and image processing. The bar shapes in the NIRCam images are artifacts of the telescope’s optics, not objects in the scene. (Unlabeled version.) Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA, A Carter (UCSC), the ERS 1386 team, and A. Pagan (STScI).
Contrarily, HIP 65426 b orbits its star at a distance 100 times larger than the Earth does from the Sun, which made it easier for astronomers to recognize the planet in Webb's images. The coronagraphs on Webb's sensors black out the star's disc to lessen glare and make it simpler to find and focus on an exoplanet.
“It was really impressive how well the Webb coronagraphs worked to suppress the light of the host star,” Dr Hinkley said.
These images, which were taken using various filters and Webb's Near-infrared camera (Nircam) and Mid-infrared instrument (Miri), are just the start of what experts expect will be a protracted sequence of exoplanet studies and discoveries made possible by the new space telescope. The images come after a new examination of one of Webb's initial discoveries, a spectrum of light from the exoplanet Wasp 39b, which proved for the first time that carbon dioxide exists in the atmosphere of an extraterrestrial world.
“I think what’s most exciting is that we’ve only just begun,” University of California, Santa Cruz post doctoral researcher Aarynn Carter, who analyzed the new Webb images of HIP 65426 b, said in a statement. “There are many more images of exoplanets to come that will shape our overall understanding of their physics, chemistry, and formation. We may even discover previously unknown planets, too.”
– Elizabeth Landau, NASA Headquarters