The James Webb Space Telescope has achieved a historic milestone by capturing what is believed to be the first direct image of an exoplanet, TWA 7 b. This finding, published in Nature, highlights Webb's significant capabilities, as it not only depicts an exoplanet but also confirms its existence. TWA 7 b is approximately the size of Neptune and orbits around the young star TWA 7. The team used innovative techniques to overcome the challenges posed by the star's brightness, thereby enabling this groundbreaking discovery about a relatively young planetary system.
"If confirmed, this would represent Webb's first direct image discovery of a planet," they wrote of the finding, "and the lightest planet ever seen with this technique outside the solar system."
"Here we're looking at a system that is about 6 [million] years old, so we are really witnessing the youth of the planetary system," Anne-Marie Lagrange, astrophysicist and first author of the paper, told The Guardian.
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