It might look like a couple of colourful smudges but it could be the next step in finding habitable planets outside our own.
NASA has released the first picture of HIP 65426 b, an exoplanet that's six to 12 times the mass of Jupiter.
It marks the first time that astronomers have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to take a direct image of a planet outside our solar system.
The image — as seen through four different light filters — shows how Webb’s powerful infrared gaze can easily capture worlds beyond our solar system, pointing the way to future observations that will reveal more information than ever before about exoplanets.
It is young as planets go — about 15 to 20 million years old — compared to our 4.5-billion-year-old Earth.
The exoplanet is a gas giant, meaning it has no rocky surface and could not be habitable, according to University of Exeter's associate professor of physics and astronomy, Sasha Hinkley, who led observations with international collaborators.
"This is a transformative moment, not only for Webb but also for astronomy generally," Dr Hinkley said.
What is an exoplanet?
All of the planets in our solar system revolve around the Sun.
An exoplanet is any planet that orbits around stars other than the Sun.
How are we able to see an exoplanet?
Exoplanets are extremely hard to see with telescopes because they become hidden by the bright glare of the stars they move around.
The Webb telescope's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) are both equipped with coronagraphs, which are sets of tiny masks that block out starlight, enabling it to take direct images of certain exoplanets such as this one.
Exoplanets also really far away from us. HIP 65426 b is 385 light-years away from Earth, in the Centaurus constellation, one of the largest and brightest constellations in the southern sky.
Since HIP 65426 b is about 100 times farther from its host star than Earth is from the Sun, it is sufficiently distant from the star that the Webb telescope can easily separate the planet from the star in the image.
Is this the first exoplanet we've seen?
No, but it is the first exoplanet image from the James Webb Space Telescope.
The first exoplanets were discovered in the 1990s using less advanced technology. Since then, thousands of planets beyond our solar system have been confirmed.
There are four different types of exoplanets that have been observed so far:
- Gas giant (like HIP 65426 b): A giant planet composed mainly of gas
- Neptune-like: Gaseous worlds around the size of Neptune
- Super-Earth: A potentially rocky world, larger than Earth — they may or may not have atmospheres
- Terrestrial: A rocky world outside the solar system — some may have oceans or atmospheres.
The discovery of exoplanets has revealed some amazing and sometimes scary things about planets in our universe.
Such as HD 189773b, a gas giant just 64 light-years away from us where its extremely high winds and temperature causes it to rain glass shards.
Or K2-18b, which excited astronomers in 2019 when it was announced that water had been discovered in its atmosphere.
Unfortunately, it was found that K2-18b could potentially be covered in super-heated, super compressed seas where the water exists somewhere between liquid and gas — meaning you'd be vaporised if you tried to take a dip.
ABC/NASA
