First, the James Webb telescope captures images of exoplanets

Liputan6.com, Jakarta – NASA reveals the first photo of an exoplanet taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The image shows a brilliant sphere of light that is seven times heavier than the planet Jupiter and orbits a star about 400 light-years away.

To be known, exoplanet it is a gigantic lump of gas and is often interpreted as a planet that has no rocky surface and is uninhabitable. The planet with another name HIP 65425 b is about 15-20 million years old and is considered a young planet compared to the Earth, which is 4.5 billion years old.

Astronomers first discovered the planet in 2017 using the SPHERE instrument on the largest telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. The telescope captures images using short-wave infrared light.

Then, presence James Webb telescope they provide a better image than previous telescopes. The Webb telescope has longer infrared wavelengths, allowing the telescope to capture new details that cannot be seen with telescopes to the ground.

The James Webb Telescope is a telescope that took decades to build and launched in December 2021. Now the telescope has floated a million miles from Earth and started operating this summer.

Till now, telescope helped make observations of several galaxies at dawn and photographed beautiful views of Jupiter. Astronomers claim that this telescope performs ten times better than they imagined when used to observe exoplanets.

The observations of exoplanets are a project by a team led by astrophysicist Sasha Hinkley of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.

Reported Wired.comOn Tuesday (9/13/2022), astronomers directly photographed about two dozen exoplanets. Thus, the James Webb telescope offers the possibility to increase the ability to take pictures of exoplanets using a 6.5 meter wide hexagonal mirror.

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