James Webb Space Telescope Reveals Its First Direct Image of an Exoplanet
58 comments
·June 27, 2025GMoromisato
GolfPopper
We can do better than that! Using the Sun as a gravitation lens[1], and a probe at a focal point of 542 AU, we could get 25km scale surface resolution on a planet 98 ly away. [2] This would be an immense and time-consuming endeavor, but does seem to be within humanity's current technological capabilities.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
2. https://www.nasa.gov/general/direct-multipixel-imaging-and-s...
os2warpman
A maintenance-free power source capable of lasting the 200 or so years it would take to make it to 542 AU does not seem within humanity's current technological capabilities.
Parker could make it there in a century, but it doesn't have to slow down and stop. Or station keep.
When we have a power source that can do 5kW for 100 years I'll agree that its design can be refined and its lifespan extended to 200 and 542 AU is within our reach.
kilroy123
I was going to post the same exact thing and links.
Of all the possible space probes or missions we could do. I want this one more than any of them!
GMoromisato
Agreed! This might be easier than an interferometer. You just need a lot of delta-v
JumpCrisscross
Do we have a recent cost estimate?
twothreeone
"We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down, and worry about our place in the dirt."
nico
How big would the telescope/mirror/lens need to be to get a picture of something in the Alpha Centauri system, 4.37 light years away?
Also, could the image be created by “scanning” a big area and then composing the image from a bunch of smaller ones?
GMoromisato
It's linear, so if it is 25 times closer then the telescope can be 25 times smaller. At 4.37 light-years we'd need an 18 kilometer telescope to image at Jupiter-sized planet at 100x100 pixel resolution.
If you only wanted 10x10 resolution you could get by with a 1.8 kilometer telescope.
Wikipedia has more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution. The Rayleigh criterion is the equation to calculate this.
bravesoul2
L2 is moving though right? Or does it need to be simultaneously receiving at the 2 points?
GMoromisato
Sadly, it has to be simultaneous.
My (tenuous) understanding of interferometry is that you receive light from two points separated by a baseline and then combine that light in such a way that the wavelengths match up and reinforce at appropriate points.
Wikipedia has a decent summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis
behnamoh
Yet another reminder that space is huge and no matter how big we can imagine, due to the realities of physics, there is a good chance that we might never be able to reach the far stars and galaxies.
grues-dinner
The depressing, if that's the right word, counterpoint to all the "oh my god it's fun of stars" deep fields crammed with millions of galaxies per square arcsecond is that the expansion of the universe means that nearly all of them are permanently and irrevocably out of reach even with near-lightspeed travel: they'll literally wink out of observable reality before we could ever get to them, leaving only a few nearby galaxies in the sky. At best you can reach the handful of gravitationally-bound galaxies in the local group.
Not that the Milky Way is a small place, but even most sci-fi featuring FTL and all sorts of handwaves has to content itself with shenanigans confined to a single galaxy due to the mindblowing, and accelerating, gaps between galaxies.
sho_hn
It's a shame, but in a glass-falf-full sense the fact that this planet is our little boat in the ocean and all that we got is also a quite helpful focusing reminder and scope constraint.
That the stars are beyond reach might be depressing, how aggresively we are gambling our little boat is on the other hand actively scary and perhaps the dominant limit on humanity's effective reach.
m3kw9
Didn’t China able to shoot lasers to the moon orbit for comms?
aaronbrethorst
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
kergonath
> What an appropriate name for an astrophysicist. I wonder if she's distantly related to the namesake of the Lagrange point.
Scopus has 390 profiles of people named Lagrange. It is not a very popular family name but it is not uncommon either and some of them are bound to end up in academia, whether they are descendants of Joseph-Louis or not.
louthy
Exactly my thought too, probably nominative determinism striking again
GMoromisato
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.
thebruce87m
> 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”
dredmorbius
With time, orbital motion should distinguish the two possibilities.
Though at a 50 AU orbit around a smallish star, that might take a while.
silverquiet
That actually makes one wonder if it will move enough within the lifetime of JWST to actually detect that orbital motion.
dredmorbius
That should be calculable.
Orbital mechanics, orbital period, and minimum determinable arc of JWST.
Though another thought is that doppler might also reveal velocity, if a spectrum could be obtained. Since the system is nearly perpendicular to the Solar System (we're viewing it face-on rather than from the side), those shifts will be small.
ryanisnan
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.
pkaye
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.
xorbax
If it's allowed to continue, which seems very shakey at the moment. NASA's would from DOGE will result in projects - even mostly completed one - being trashed.
JumpCrisscross
China is catching up on optics and launch. The torch of civilisation seems unlikely to be lost if we fuck it up that badly.
ceejayoz
I’m not sure why this is downvoted. It’s entirely accurate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...
> In April 2025, the second Trump administration proposed to cut funding for Roman again as part of its FY2026 budget draft. This was part of wider proposed cuts to NASA's science budget, down to US$3.9 billion from its FY2025 budget of US$7.5 billion. On April 25, 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget announced a plan to cancel dozens of space missions, including the Roman Space Telescope, as part of the cuts.
cryptoz
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.
sanxiyn
FYI: Direct Multipixel Imaging and Spectroscopy of an Exoplanet with a Solar Gravity Lens Mission. https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.11871
dylan604
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
an arcsecond at 550AU is "only" 400,125 km. So, in theory, it's correctable in days.
neom
neom
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)
BitwiseFool
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.
WalterBright
Yes, and too bad a twin or two weren't developed simultaneously, as the additional cost would be minimal - and now we have SpaceX rockets to launch them.
adriand
My fantasy is that at some point we’ll have a sufficiently powerful telescope to cause a galactic “Van Leeuwenhoek moment” where, just like that discoverer of microbes, we will suddenly see the galaxy swarming with spacecraft.
dylan604
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.
rwmj
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
Do NOT trust my napkin math, but I believe TWA 7 moves ~0.6 "pixels" (0.02 arcsec) per Earth-year.
ge96
The star thing made me think "Who's that planetoid?"
edit: but it's the orange thing not the star
tiahura
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?
meatmanek
Because exoplanets by definition are going to be found adjacent to stars, which limits the area you need to search. Planets are fairly common, so you don't need to look at that many stars before you find evidence of an exoplanet, provided you have a good-enough telescope.
A hypothetical planet beyond Pluto be in a huge part of the sky: Presumably the orbit of such a planet could be inclined about as much as Pluto's. The 17-degree inclination of Pluto's orbit means it could be in a 34-degree wide strip of the sky, which, if I'm doing my math right, is about 29% of the full sky. If we allow for up to a 30 degree inclination, then that's half the sky.
There's also the matter of object size and brightness. The proposed Planet Nine[1] was supposed to be a few hundred AU away, and around the mass of 4 or 5 Earths. The object discovered in this paper is around 100 M🜨, at around 52 AU from its star. Closer and larger. (Of course, there's a sweet spot for exoplanet discovery, where you want the planet to be close enough to be bright, but far enough away to be outside the glare of the star.)
charlieyu1
Because we are looking for much smaller planets.
koolala
Why is it censored?
skybrian
They have to block out the light of the star so that it doesn't overwhelm the light from the planet.
umeshunni
Not sure if you're joking, but in case you're not - the star at the center is usually so bright that its light drowns out the light of anything nearby. In such cases, the star is covered so that the dimmer objects nearby are visible.
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.