This Thursday, September 1 NASA reports on the first photo taken by the James Webb telescope of an exoplanet that has no rocky body, unfit for habitation. This image promises to help study this type of planet, as Webb’s technology also manages to get a catch with four different filters.

It should be noted that an exoplanet is any planet that is outside our solar system. Regarding the body captured by the telescope, it corresponds to HIP 65426 b, and according to a NASA investigation, was discovered in 2017 by the European Southern Observatory in Chile, while scientists use the SPHERE instrument on the Very Large Telescope.

Estimated HIP 65426 b has between 6 and 12 times the total mass of Jupiter, it is considered a young gas planet, as it will be between 15 and 20 million years old, while Earth has added more than 4,500 million years.

“This is a transformative moment, not only for Webb but for astronomy in general… It’s impressive how well Webb’s coronagraph works to suppress light from its host star.” explains Sasha Hinkley, who is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Exeter in the UK, and one of the people who led the observations.

Despite how valuable this type of photography is to science, capturing it is not easy, because according to NASA, this exoplanet is 100 times farther from its parent star, compared to the distance from the Sun to Earth. The telescope took advantage of being able to take a close-up shot of HIP 65426 b, without the image being affected by the central star.

“Getting this image feels like digging for space treasure. At first all I could see was light from the stars, but with careful image processing, I was able to dispel that light and find the planet.” said Aarynn Carter, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, and one of the people who led the analysis of the images.

The James Webb Telescope makes a surprising discovery about an exoplanet

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have found definitive evidence of the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the gas giant planet -WASP-39 b-, orbits a sun-like star 700 light-years away.

As reported by the space agency, These findings provide important information about the composition and formation of planetsand demonstrated Webb’s ability to also detect and measure carbon dioxide in the thinner atmospheres of smaller rocky planets.

WASP-39b it is a hot gas giant with a mass of about a quarter the mass of Jupiter (almost the same as Saturn) and 1.3 times larger in diameter than Jupiter. Its extreme swelling is partly related to its high temperature (around 900 °C).

In contrast to the cooler, more compact gas giants in the Solar System, WASP-39 b orbits very close to its parent star, only about one-eighth of the distance between the Sun and Mercurycomplete the circuit in just four Earth days.

The discovery of the planet, reported in 2011, based on ground-based detection of the subtle and periodic dimming of the parent star’s light as the planet transits or pass in front of the stars.

Transiting planets like WASP-39 b, whose orbits are viewed from the edge rather than from above, could provide researchers with an ideal opportunity to probe planetary atmospheres, according to the ESA.

In this sense, he has shown that, during transit, some of the starlight is blocked by the planet completely (causing general dimming) and part is transmitted through the planet’s atmosphere. “The atmosphere filters some colors more than others, depending on factors such as what it is made of, how thick it is, and whether or not there are clouds“, has been added.