James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope has directly imaged its lowest mass extrasolar planet outside the solar system yet. The planet is also the closest to its star to be directly observed by the $10 billion space telescope.

The imaging was a "race against time" with the extrasolar planet, or "exoplanet," about to disappear behind the blinding light of its parent star, perhaps for as long as a decade.

The planet AF Leporis b (AF Lep b) is no stranger to setting records. In 2023, this extrasolar planet, or "exoplanet," became the lowest-mass planet beyond the solar system to be discovered by direct observation. It then became the lowest-mass world to have its mass measured by "astrometry," a technique that monitors the motion of a star over many years to identify "wobbles" caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet.

AF Lep b is a young exoplanet estimated to be just 23 million years old. If that sounds ancient, consider that the Earth is estimated to be 4.6 billion years old. AF Lep b has a mass around 3.2 times that of Jupiter and a width around 1.2 times that of the solar system gas giant.

"AF Lep b is right at the inner edge of being detectable. Even though it is extraordinarily sensitive, JWST is smaller than our largest telescopes on the ground," University of Texas at Austin researcher Kyle Franson said in a statement. "And we’re observing at longer wavelengths, which has the effect of making objects look fuzzier. It becomes difficult to separate one source from another when they appear so close together."

Yet, because it is 88 light-years from Earth, AF Lep b still appears to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as little more than a speck. Fortunately, astronomers can learn a heck of a lot from such a "speck."

Since the discovery of the first exoplanet in the 1990s, the exoplanet catalog has burgeoned to over 6,000 entries, with thousands more to be confirmed. Yet, very few of these have been directly imaged.

Most exoplanets are detected via their effect on their host star, either when they block light as they cross the face of their star or from gravitational tugs they exert on that star............

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