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Webb Telescope images Jupiter-like planet 350 light years away
The star HIP 65426 (top) is known to have a young planet, but it is hard to see because of glare from the bright star. The James Webb Space Telescope was able to block the starlight and image the planet in seven wavelengths of infrared light (four shown at bottom), revealing details of the planet’s temperature and composition. Purple shows the NIRCam instrument’s view at a wavelength of 3 microns (a thousandth of a millimeter); blue shows the NIRCam instrument’s view at 4.44 microns; yellow shows the MIRI instrument’s view at 11.40 microns; and red shows the MIRI instrument’s view at 15.50 microns. The shapes of the images are different because of the different ways the telescope’s instruments capture light. The bar shapes in the NIRCam images are artifacts of the telescope’s optics, not objects in the scene. (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA, A. Carter (UCSC), the ERS 1386 team, and A. Pagan, STScI) UC Berkeley adjunct professor of astronomy Paul Kalas is co-investigator of a team that used the new James Webb Space Telescope to capture images of an exoplanet 350 light years from Earth.