[HN Gopher] James Webb Space Telescope Reveals Its First Direct ...
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James Webb Space Telescope Reveals Its First Direct Image of an
Exoplanet
Author : divbzero
Score : 44 points
Date : 2025-06-27 17:44 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| ge96 wrote:
| The star thing made me think "Who's that planetoid?"
|
| edit: but it's the orange thing not the star
| neom wrote:
| Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09150-4
| neom wrote:
| I 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 (doesn't render tiffs I guess, so
| hit download)
| ryanisnan wrote:
| 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.
| cryptoz wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| this 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 wrote:
| an arcsecond at 550AU is "only" 400,125 km. So, in theory,
| it's correctable in days.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| FYI: Direct Multipixel Imaging and Spectroscopy of an
| Exoplanet with a Solar Gravity Lens Mission.
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.11871
| pkaye wrote:
| The 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.
| rwmj wrote:
| So 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 wrote:
| Do NOT trust my napkin math, but I believe TWA 7 moves ~0.6
| "pixels" (0.02 arcsec) per Earth-year.
| timmg wrote:
| How 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 wrote:
| Or imagine another civilization looking at our lights with
| their telescope
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| it'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.
| BryanLegend wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_Antliae
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09150-4
| thebruce87m wrote:
| > 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"
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| _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
| louthy wrote:
| Exactly my thought too, probably nominative determinism
| striking again
| koolala wrote:
| Why is it censored?
| skybrian wrote:
| They have to block out the light of the star so that it doesn't
| overwhelm the light from the planet.
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