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JWST reveals its first direct image discovery of an exoplanet
- neom 1y agoPaper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09150-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09150-4
- neom 1y agoI really liked the image a lot so I emailed the author of the paper to see if she had a version without the clipart,she didn't but said it was fine to remove it, so: https://s.h4x.club/YEuYLW8z https://s.h4x.club/YEuYLW8z (doesn't render tiffs I guess, so hit download)
- ge96 1y agoThe star thing made me think "Who's that planetoid?" edit: but it's the orange thing not the star
- grg0 1y agoIf you showed this to Trump, he would believe that is what an actual star looks like. Even a child knows that a star has five pointy ends!
- ryanisnan 1y agoThis 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 1y agoThat 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 1y agothis 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?
- umeshunni 1y agoan arcsecond at 550AU is "only" 400,125 km. So, in theory, it's correctable in days.
- sanxiyn 1y agoFYI: Direct Multipixel Imaging and Spectroscopy of an Exoplanet with a Solar Gravity Lens Mission. https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.11871 https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.11871
- pkaye 1y agoThe 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.
- xorbax 1y agoIf it's allowed to continue, which seems very shakey at the moment. NASA's would from DOGE will result in projects - even mostly completed one - being trashed.
- ceejayoz 1y agoI’m not sure why this is downvoted. It’s entirely accurate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telescope?wprov=sfti1#Funding_history_and_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc... > In April 2025, the second Trump administration proposed to cut funding for Roman again as part of its FY2026 budget draft. This was part of wider proposed cuts to NASA's science budget, down to US$3.9 billion from its FY2025 budget of US$7.5 billion. On April 25, 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget announced a plan to cancel dozens of space missions, including the Roman Space Telescope, as part of the cuts.
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoChina is catching up on optics and launch. The torch of civilisation seems unlikely to be lost if we fuck it up that badly.
- rwmj 1y agoSo 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 1y agoDo NOT trust my napkin math, but I believe TWA 7 moves ~0.6 "pixels" (0.02 arcsec) per Earth-year.
- timmg 1y agoHow 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 1y agoOr imagine another civilization looking at our lights with their telescope
- deadbabe 1y agoAnd imagine that the only reason, the ONLY reason, they haven’t completely blown us away, is because our planet happens to be one of the very rare planets where the ratio of the size of our moon and earth is in such a way that you can witness a total solar eclipse as a black hole in the sky once a year, and they would like to witness this event someday.
- krapp 1y agoThat's no reason not to blow us away, eclipses still work if there are no annoying humans around to see them.
- qw 1y agoWhat if FTL is not possible? In that case the attack will take a long time to reach us, and in the meantime we will be much more advanced technologically and could potentially defend ourselves. In sci-fi we see warp drives, worm hole travel, phasers, photon torpedos and energy shields around ships. But what if none of that is possible? In that case, we might even have the technology to defend ourselves today if we manage to detect the attack in time. It's a huge risk for a civilization to attack us. Even if they have capabilities that are beyond our technology, there might still be limitations based on the laws of physics. And if they attack us, they risk a response.
- BitwiseFool 1y agoThe 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 1y agoit'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.
- lawlessone 1y agoAriane 5 seems pretty proven to me :D
- adriand 1y agoMy fantasy is that at some point we’ll have a sufficiently powerful telescope to cause a galactic “Van Leeuwenhoek moment” where, just like that discoverer of microbes, we will suddenly see the galaxy swarming with spacecraft.
- sneak 1y agoAssume for a moment that happens. Can you possibly imagine the chaos and turmoil that causes on Earth?
- BryanLegend 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_Antliae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_Antliae https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09150-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09150-4
- thebruce87m 1y ago> Although there is a slight possibility that the newly detected infrared source might be a background galaxy I understand the difficulty in what they are doing, but the scale of the error here is amusing. “We thing we took a picture of something, but it might have been billions of things much bigger but further away”
- dredmorbius 1y agoWith time, orbital motion should distinguish the two possibilities. Though at a 50 AU orbit around a smallish star, that might take a while.
- silverquiet 1y agoThat actually makes one wonder if it will move enough within the lifetime of JWST to actually detect that orbital motion.
- dredmorbius 1y agoThat should be calculable. Orbital mechanics, orbital period, and minimum determinable arc of JWST. Though another thought is that doppler might also reveal velocity, if a spectrum could be obtained. Since the system is nearly perpendicular to the Solar System (we're viewing it face-on rather than from the side), those shifts will be small.
- aaronbrethorst 1y agoAnne-Marie Lagrange, lead author of the study What an appropriate name for an astrophysicist. I wonder if she's distantly related to the namesake of the Lagrange point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point Incidentally, although I'd never heard of A-M Lagrange before now, she's had an incredible career: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne-Marie_Lagrange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne-Marie_Lagrange
- louthy 1y agoExactly my thought too, probably nominative determinism striking again
- kergonath 1y ago> What an appropriate name for an astrophysicist. I wonder if she's distantly related to the namesake of the Lagrange point. Scopus has 390 profiles of people named Lagrange. It is not a very popular family name but it is not uncommon either and some of them are bound to end up in academia, whether they are descendants of Joseph-Louis or not.
- fanatic2pope 1y agoIn fact, JWST orbits L2! https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/01F4STZH25YJH07WTN7XJYQP8P https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/01F4STZH25YJ...
- koolala 1y agoWhy is it censored?
- umeshunni 1y agoNot sure if you're joking, but in case you're not - the star at the center is usually so bright that its light drowns out the light of anything nearby. In such cases, the star is covered so that the dimmer objects nearby are visible.
- skybrian 1y agoThey have to block out the light of the star so that it doesn't overwhelm the light from the planet.
- m3kw9 1y agoDid it come from JPL?
- twothreeone 1y agoBunch of liberals.. shakes fist /s
- GMoromisato 1y agoIn case anyone is wondering, we are (sadly) very far from getting an image of this planet (or any extra-solar planet) that is more than 1 pixel across. At 110 light-years distance you would need a telescope ~450 kilometers across to image this planet at 100x100 pixel resolution--about the size of a small icon. That is a physical limit based on the wavelength of light. The best we could do is build a space-based optical interferometer with two nodes 450 kilometers apart, but synchronized to 1 wavelength. That's a really tough engineering challenge.
- nico 1y agoHow big would the telescope/mirror/lens need to be to get a picture of something in the Alpha Centauri system, 4.37 light years away? Also, could the image be created by “scanning” a big area and then composing the image from a bunch of smaller ones?
- GMoromisato 1y agoIt's linear, so if it is 25 times closer then the telescope can be 25 times smaller. At 4.37 light-years we'd need an 18 kilometer telescope to image at Jupiter-sized planet at 100x100 pixel resolution. If you only wanted 10x10 resolution you could get by with a 1.8 kilometer telescope. Wikipedia has more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution. The Rayleigh criterion is the equation to calculate this.
- joshvm 1y agoIt's a lot easier to reason about this using angular resolution, because that's normally what the diffraction limit formula is in reference to. If you know the angular diameter of the system (α) and the wavelength (say λ=500 nm for visible), you can use α ≈ λ/d and solve for the aperture of the telescope (d). That puts a basic limit on the smallest thing you can resolve with a given aperture. You can use the angular diameter of the planet and the resolution you're after. For Alpha Centauri A it's 8.5 milli arc-second, so O(1 μas) for a 100px image? That's just for the star! The Event Horizon Telescope can achieve around 20-25 μas in microwave; you need a planet-scale interferometer to do that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope It's possible to do radio measurements in sync with good clocks and fast sampling/storage, much harder with visible. I'm not super up to date on visible approaches, but there is LISA which will be a large scale interferometer in space. The technology for synchronising the satellites is similar to what you'd need for this in the optical. https://www.edmundoptics.com/knowledge-center/application-notes/imaging/limitations-on-resolution-and-contrast-the-airy-disk/ https://www.edmundoptics.com/knowledge-center/application-no... https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0303634 https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0303634
- tiahura 1y agoHow is it that we can spot a planet 110 light years away, but whether there’s another planet in the solar system past Pluto is a matter of legitimate scientific debate?
- charlieyu1 1y agoBecause we are looking for much smaller planets.
- meatmanek 1y agoBecause exoplanets by definition are going to be found adjacent to stars, which limits the area you need to search. Planets are fairly common, so you don't need to look at that many stars before you find evidence of an exoplanet, provided you have a good-enough telescope. A hypothetical planet beyond Pluto be in a huge part of the sky: Presumably the orbit of such a planet could be inclined about as much as Pluto's. The 17-degree inclination of Pluto's orbit means it could be in a 34-degree wide strip of the sky, which, if I'm doing my math right, is about 29% of the full sky. If we allow for up to a 30 degree inclination, then that's half the sky. There's also the matter of object size and brightness. The proposed Planet Nine[1] was supposed to be a few hundred AU away, and around the mass of 4 or 5 Earths. The object discovered in this paper is around 100 M🜨, at around 52 AU from its star. Closer and larger. (Of course, there's a sweet spot for exoplanet discovery, where you want the planet to be close enough to be bright, but far enough away to be outside the glare of the star.) 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine
- ethan_smith 1y agoThe paradox is explained by different detection methods: exoplanets like this one glow in infrared and are directly visible against the black of space, while Planet Nine would be extremely dim, non-glowing, and lost in the cluttered background of our galaxy's disk.
- GMoromisato 1y agoAnother cool thing is that this technique is biased towards planets far from their star, because it is easier to see a planet the further away from their bright star. In contrast, current techniques are biased towards close-in planets. Both Doppler-shift and light-curve methods tend to detect close-in planets. We’ll get a better idea of the distribution of planets with both techniques.
- bane 1y agoI've been bearish on the JWST in the past. I've thought it an investment in science that could have been made better by waiting a bit for cheaper heavy lift and advances in computational imaging. However, this is the culmination of the construction of a cathedral to science. Every stone laid one atop another from our first comprehension of the cosmos to our emergence from our long dream as the center of a deity constructed universe has resulted in a discipline that can not only conceive of other spheres we can stand on, to entire other systems of spheres we can now see. This is magnificent.
- bearjaws 1y agoWhy bother doing anything then? You can apply this logic to pretty much anything. The better thing is just around the corner, might as well wait. I'm sure many other advancements were made by JWST that can be applied to your theoretical better telescope.
- jl6 1y ago> To further support their observations, Lagrange and her colleagues ran computer models that visualized the potential planetary system. The simulations yielded images that aligned with the ones captured by the telescope. “This was really why we were confident that there was a planet,” Don’t get me wrong, I love that we are doing this work and have no reason to doubt that this is indeed an exoplanet image, but I view this kind of modelling as a pretty weak form of support for a hypothesis. Models are built from assumptions, which are influenced by expectations. They are not data.
- fc417fc802 1y agoIt depends on how the model was constructed and how it is used. Ideally you expect the vast majority of possible observations not to fit your model. So if they do then that's a strong indicator that you have what you expect. Whereas if they don't you can't be certain if the model is maybe just not quite right.
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- danparsonson 1y agoI was aware that we have directly imaged exoplanets before, but I didn't know just how many we've seen now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exoplanets https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exop... Not to take anything away from JWST - every one of these is an incredible achievement!
- imoverclocked 1y agoThe article starts using JSWT instead of JWST … is anyone here able to effect an edit?
- padjo 1y agoIt’s been truly fascinating to is f_p from the Drake equation go from a guess of maybe 0.5 as an upper bound to an increasingly confident 1 in my lifetime.
- meatmanek 1y agoThe HN title is subtly incorrect: this isn't the first direct image of an exoplanet from JWST. Here's an article from March showing several exoplanet images from JWST: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-images-young-giant-exoplanets-detects-carbon-dioxide/ https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-images-you... The key word "discovery" has been removed from the headline from TFA: "The James Webb Space Telescope Reveals Its First Direct Image Discovery of an Exoplanet". I.e, this is the first time that direct imagery was used to _discover_ a planet we didn't know existed previously.
- dang 1y agoOk, we've put discovery in there now. Thanks! Submitted title was "James Webb Space Telescope reveals its first direct image of an exoplanet", which I'm sure was just a good-faith attempt to fit HN's 80 char title limit. I've achieved that by compressing to JWST now :)
- lx__jakir__king 1y ago[flagged]
- sylware 1y agoNice web site: "enable javascript to continue" Any direct link on the pic?
- mensetmanusman 1y agoHow would you feel if you were a planet mistaken for a galaxy?
- wasabinator 1y agoAnother way to put that 111 light year distance into perspective, the Voyager space probes are yet to pass 1 light day from earth.