WASHINGTON: In addition to providing a trove of information about the early universe, the James Webb Space Telescope since its 2021 launch has obtained valuable data on various already-known planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets. Now, for the first time, Webb has discovered an exoplanet not previously known.
Webb has directly imaged a young gas giant planet roughly the size of Saturn, our solar system’s second-largest planet, orbiting a star smaller than the sun located about 110 light-years from Earth in the constellation Antlia, researchers said. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
Most of the roughly 5,900 exoplanets discovered since the 1990s have been detected using indirect methods, such as through observation of the slight dimming of a star’s light when a planet passes in front of it, called the transit method. Less than 2% of them have been directly imaged, as Webb did with the newly identified planet.
While this planet is large when considered in the context of our solar system, it is actually the least massive one ever discovered through direct imaging - 10 times less massive than the previous record holder. This speaks to the sensitivity of Webb’s instruments.
This discovery was achieved using a French-produced coronagraph, a device that blocks out the bright light from a star, installed on Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI.
“Webb opens a new window - in terms of mass and the distance of a planet to the star - of exoplanets that had not been accessible to observations so far. This is important to explore the diversity of exoplanetary systems and understand how they form and evolve,” said astronomer Anne-Marie Lagrange of the French research agency CNRS and LIRA/Observatoire de Paris, lead author of the study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
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