James Webb Space Telescope Reveals Its First Direct Image of an Exoplanet

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/james-webb-space-telescope-reveals-its-first-direct-image-discovery-of-an-exoplanet-180986886/

32•divbzero•4h ago

Comments

ge96•55m ago

The star thing made me think "Who's that planetoid?"

edit: but it's the orange thing not the star

neom•54m ago

Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09150-4

ryanisnan•51m ago

This is super exciting. It seems possible to one day receive higher resolution images of this type of find. Perhaps someone who is more familiar with this subject can opine.

The moment we have our first, direct-observation photo of an earth-like exoplanet will be a defining point in our history.

cryptoz•41m ago

That will be done with a solar gravitational lens - there's a recent-ish NASA paper about it. Basically you send your probe to > 550 AU in the opposite direction of your target exoplanet, point it at the Sun and you will get a warped high-res photo of the planet around the Sun. You can then algorithmically decode it into a regular photo.

I think the transit time is likely decades and the build time is also a long time as well. But in maybe 40-100 years we could have plentiful HD images of 'nearby' exoplanets. If I'm still around when it happens I will be beyond hyped.

dylan604•18m ago

this is one of those where a missed alignment is going to be a huge bummer. 550AU * arcseconds is a long way off looking not at what you wanted. you wouldn't know until you were at minimum distance which is going to take generations to achieve. voyager 1 is only ~166AU and that was >40 years. so if you try to nudge your coarse, how many more generations would it be before it was aligned correctly?

pkaye•23m ago

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is supposed to have even better coronagraph as a technology demonstrator. They keep finding ways to improve on the technology.

rwmj•49m ago

So presumably they'll be able to take another photograph in a year or two and the planet will have visibly moved? (Jupiter's orbital period around the Sun is about 12 years, but this planet is about 10 times further from the star and has an estimated orbital period of 550 years.)

monster_truck•42m ago

Do NOT trust my napkin math, but I believe TWA 7 moves ~0.6 "pixels" (0.02 arcsec) per Earth-year.

timmg•46m ago

How cool would it be to directly image artificial light on the "dark side" of a planet (like all the photos you see of lights on earth at night)?

I mean, even if there is life it's like 1 in a gazillion. But you could imagine some ML looking through all of its images to find planets, etc.

ripped_britches•2m ago

Or imagine another civilization looking at our lights with their telescope

BitwiseFool•25m ago

The JWST is a marvel of engineering. It is also a machine designed around the restrictions of what the most powerful rockets of the 1990's were capable of. Just imagine how capable future telescopes will be now that we have multiple super-heavy launch vehicles with cavernous payload fairings in development.

dylan604•15m ago

it's hard to commit to building JWST type of payload around a non-yet proven launcher. you'd want to wait until the "in development" becomes proven before planning to launch some decadal planned mission.

BryanLegend•11m ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_Antliae https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09150-4

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