HN Reader

JWST reveals its first direct image discovery of an exoplanet

344

150

In 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.

7 months agoby GMoromisato

Anne-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

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

7 months agoby aaronbrethorst

I'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.

7 months agoby bane

> 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”

7 months agoby thebruce87m

Another way to put that 111 light year distance into perspective, the Voyager space probes are yet to pass 1 light day from earth.

7 months agoby wasabinator

Another 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.

7 months agoby GMoromisato

> 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.

7 months agoby jl6

The 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-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.

7 months agoby meatmanek

The 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.

7 months agoby BitwiseFool

This 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.

7 months agoby ryanisnan

Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09150-4

7 months agoby neom

How 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?

7 months agoby tiahura

I 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_exop...

Not to take anything away from JWST - every one of these is an incredible achievement!